Southern Girl

by Lukas,Renee J.

  It was true though. Boys got to wear all the comfortable, one hundred percent cotton shirts and jeans that let you move around easily. Girls had to wear clothes that cut off your blood supply if you turned a certain way. Or blouses that had so many ties they took hours to put on. Jess couldn’t figure out what went where. Worst of all, girls’ clothes were usually made of polyester or fibers that were so itchy it was like slipping on an entire patch of poison ivy. With each new grade, the girls were dressing up more like Christmas trees, while boys stayed pretty much the same. The bottom line: Wearing dresses or ribbons in her hair made Jess feel silly. So she didn’t. Luckily, her mom didn’t push too hard, except on Sundays. Those days were the worst.

  There was no doubt in her mind that this would be a year when what she wore or did would come under more scrutiny than ever—and simply because she was a girl. Never mind that it was now the eighties, and everyone on MTV was pushing the gender boundaries—men in makeup, women in crew cuts with jackets and ties. They were entertainers so they got a pass for shocking people.

  You didn’t get that sort of pass in a small Tennessee town. What you got was a whole lot of gossip. For the preacher’s kids, there could be no such gossip. It was understood that their father wouldn’t tolerate his kids doing anything that could lead to people talking about them. Their mother seemed more sympathetic to letting them have their own personalities, especially Jess. It felt as though she understood her more than her father did. But she’d never defy him if he said Jess couldn’t do this or that. That was a clear, silent, but indisputable truth.

  For a while now, Jess realized, the world had been tightening around her, small bits of her freedom diminishing so gradually that she almost didn’t notice it until this year. She could have said it was all Danny’s fault, this stress about her clothes, but that would be giving her brother too much credit. If it wasn’t Danny, it would’ve come from someone else. She knew she was different than other girls, still preferring a number jersey to a lacy-collar blouse and jeans to skirts or “girly pants,” as she called them. Jess acted as though she didn’t care because she couldn’t bear the alternative of giving in and showing up to school dressed like the girls in Ivy’s teen magazines, the ones with covers that said: “Five Ways to Make Him Notice You.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The first day of seventh grade…

  Jess had seven teachers for seven classes. Her first class was math. She slumped in her seat, trying to make herself invisible, and prayed the teacher wouldn’t call on her. At times like these she hated being the daughter of the preacher at the most popular church in town. All she wanted to do was blend in with the rest of the kids. The teacher, Mr. Crosby, liked to say he wasn’t related to Bing, and none of the kids understood the joke. He was a round, bearded man with an attitude that seemed to belong on Masterpiece Theatre or some other PBS show. He seemed angry to be teaching seventh graders, as if it was beneath him. On the first day, he wrote math problems with an X and Y in them, and Jess could feel her stomach in her throat. She tried to pay extra attention to this because she was afraid of Mr. Masterpiece Theatre. She cowered behind her textbook, copying everything he wrote in her notebook, although none of it looked exactly like what he’d written. Already off to a bad start…

  Making it even worse was the fact that she didn’t see as many of her friends. Except for a few familiar ones scattered here and there, as she wandered through the building trying to find her classes the halls were filled with the strange faces of the kids from neighboring towns.

  The last class of the day was called “Health and Development,” a subject Jess had never heard of. It was a weird class with only girls in it. For the second semester, it would be more like a study hall. But for the first semester their teacher, Ms. Jean Hammond, promised to tell them about all the wondrous things that were going to happen to their bodies. Ms. Hammond was a hundred-year-old woman with cotton for hair and a stick-thin body, who walked up and down the aisles like she was on a runway, throwing out phrases to show them how hip she was. It was really strange hearing a much older lady saying things like, “Don’t have a cow.” To make matters worse, she dressed in Brady Bunch flower pants, and nobody had the heart to tell her it was the wrong decade.

  “Now, girls,” she said, “you’re going to notice changes in your chest measurements.”

  Some of the girls giggled. Most of them had already noticed that some girls’ breasts were growing faster than theirs.

  “You’re going to notice hair in new places.”

  There was a collective groan of disgust. No one wanted to discuss this in public, especially with someone who seemed to have more in common with their grandmothers than with them.

  When Ms. Hammond finally drew a shaky diagram of a uterus and ovaries and talked about the internal goings-on of the female body, they began to talk amongst themselves, no longer interested.

  Ms. Hammond, being hard of hearing, didn’t realize she’d lost most of her audience. But one of the words she used, “menstruation,” caught Jess’s ear. It was one she remembered hearing before. It prompted a series of questions that night when her mother came to tuck her into bed.

  “What kind of ‘stuff’?” her mother asked in response to Jess’s incoherent list of stuff Ms. Hammond had been talking about.

  “I don’t know,” Jess said. “You know, stuff.” Then finally, “She said our bodies would be changing.”

  Her mother sighed. “I have a booklet I gave your sister,” she said. “It looks like it’s time to give it to you.” Her face was grave. This couldn’t be good, Jess thought. “I’d better give it to you now in case you wake up one morning with blood on your underwear.” She left the room to go dig through her dresser drawers.

  Blood on her underwear! Jess sat up. Now she was really scared. Was she going to die? Judging from her mom’s reaction, things didn’t seem very positive. She didn’t know that her mother had had an especially stressful day, that the words she had spoken had come out as a tired afterthought, and she hadn’t realized how ominous her tone was.

  Jess waited, still sitting up, now certain she’d never go to sleep again. Finally, her mom returned with a pink booklet which she handed to her. On the front was a picture of a woman smiling in a field of daisies. If she was dying, she certainly didn’t seem to be minding it.

  Carolyn said, “I meant to tell you about this before some deranged teacher over there got it all wrong.” Jess knew her mother didn’t hold the school system in very high regard. She often let her opinion fly on that particular topic.

  “Why am I gonna have blood?” Jess asked, trying to hide her panic.

  “Just read it. Come on in if you have questions, okay?” Carolyn had the oddest look on her face. She was also tired, so she made a beeline for the master bedroom next door.

  The booklet was thin and it didn’t take her long to read it in its entirety. But in her quest to find the page that talked about finding blood on your underwear, the thing she really wanted to find out about, other shocking items leapt out at her.

  She couldn’t believe what it said! She was supposed to connect with a boy someday and let him stick the part of his body that he stuffed into his jeans into the part of her between her legs, and she was supposed to like that? Doing this thing, which was called intercourse, could result in her getting pregnant like an older girl she knew in school who had to leave town for nine months. Everyone said that having a baby was more painful than the worst pain in the universe. Jess wanted no part of it. If she was going to get married as she expected to have to, her husband was going to have to be okay with her never having kids. Or they could adopt. But she wasn’t passing something the size of a bowling ball through a hole that seemed only slightly larger than a straw. She knew she’d never change her mind about that either. Getting her period meant that she wasn’t pregnant, so maybe she’d actually be grateful to see blood once a month coming out from between her legs. She couldn’t wait for it to start.
/>   “Psst! Ivy!” Jess crept slowly into her room.

  Ivy shot up from her pillow, ripping off her eye mask. “What? Who’s there?”

  “What’s that thing?” Jess had momentarily forgotten how she’d barged into her sister’s room.

  “It’s to keep out light,” Ivy sighed.

  “But it’s dark in here.”

  Ivy switched on her lamp, looking thoroughly annoyed. “What…IS…it?”

  “Did you read that book Mom has? With the girl in the daisies and the…” Jess started to do an odd charade, though she couldn’t quite finish it.

  Ivy rubbed her eyes. “Yeah, you’re lucky she gave you that.”

  “She said she gave it to you too.”

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. “Only after I freaked her out.” Obviously, this had been a traumatic experience. Ivy sat up and pulled the sheets up around her. “You were too young to remember this, but when I was little, every time a woman got pregnant, Mom would say, ‘Oh, she got too close to him.’ So I thought you could get pregnant by standing too close to a guy.”

  Jess burst out laughing. “You really thought that?”

  “Shut up. One day, I told her I’d be sure not to stand too close to this guy in church. She asked me why, I said ’cause I knew he’d get me pregnant, and then she knew she had to have the talk with me.” Ivy was dead serious. In fact, she took nearly everything very seriously and strained to see the humor in the situation. “She kept saying how it was too soon and how she didn’t expect to have to tell me when I was that young. I almost wish she didn’t. But you, you got lucky. Whatever mistakes Mom and Dad make on me, they fix it with you and Danny. So I’ll probably be much more screwed up than you.”

  Jess glanced away. “I doubt that.”

  * * *

  Not long after that, at age twelve, Jess got her first period. She had to borrow a pad from her sister. It felt like a diaper between her legs. When she went out in public, she could swear everybody knew it was there. She had visions of herself as a Sumo wrestler, imagining the pad expanding and encompassing her backside in a way it really didn’t. She kept staring in the mirror in her bedroom to make sure she couldn’t see it through her jeans. In school she became more self-conscious, certain that everyone knew what was between her legs. What an idiot she was for wanting this thing to start happening to her!

  It had said in the booklet that she was going to go through hormone changes and that she was going to become interested in sex and want to do all of these things she’d never wanted to do before. She’d been curious about kissing, but this other thing—she couldn’t imagine it. Even though what it said about periods had turned out to be true, the rest of the booklet was filled with lies. It had to be.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In 1987 Jess was seventeen. She’d grown into an attractive, sporty girl, tall with an athletic body and dirty blond hair with jagged, wispy bangs that covered kind blue eyes. When they were visible, her eyes had a quiet wisdom, as though she were always trying to solve the puzzles of the world. Heightwise, she took after her father’s side of the family. Most of the time, though, she slumped, acting as if she’d rather be invisible. Her stature wasn’t evident unless she was on a basketball court.

  Now a junior in high school, she was the star basketball player for the school’s girls’ team. It made her somewhat popular, though not as popular as she would have been had she been on the boys’ team. But it gave her permission to dress down in school if she wanted to, and nobody thought twice about it.

  Today was the Sunday after her first week in eleventh grade. Jess found herself hypnotized by the rain running like long fingers down her bedroom window. It covered up the view of endless green valleys below and the narrow gravel road that ran in front of her house.

  She had started to turn away from the window when a black and white smudge caught her attention. It was their family dog, a collie named Radar, darting in between the cows’ legs in the valley below, following his natural instinct to herd them.

  It was funny how animals always followed their instincts, but humans still had trouble with that, she thought. Her mother’s cat knew she wanted lobster, and she went for it. She didn’t play around with worries about who was watching. She didn’t care if she was getting too fat. She went up the steps to get what she wanted. Animals didn’t get embarrassed. Why else would they sniff or lick their butts in front of company?

  Though she’d felt destined to be a basketball player, Jess had resisted it. It was the most natural part of her, something that made her happier than anything else had, but she couldn’t simply embrace it and enjoy how good it made her feel. She had to consider what other people thought, particularly her father—how it would “look” if she played sports.

  She stared out her window, strange thoughts flying in and out of her head. Like the realization that this place, Greens Fork, was where all of her memories lived. Because it was her home. No matter where she went, here is where they’d always be. Was that what it was like for her mother? Where was home for her? Greens Fork? Or Boston?

  Memories were weird. This morning, for instance, she found herself thinking again about Stephanie Greer, someone she hadn’t seen in years. Why she was thinking of her on that rainy Sunday she’d never know, but when Stephanie had moved away, it was as if half of her had been ripped away. She told herself it didn’t matter, that the loss she felt was simply the melodrama of a seven-year-old, for whom everything that happened was a big deal. Still, as she stared out the dreary window, she found the memory of Stephanie’s face comforting, a warm reminder of how good she had once had it.

  She could feel pressure rushing to her eyes. Was she tearing up?

  “Jess! Come on!” her mother called from below. “We’re going to be late!”

  Jess turned away from the window, grabbed her green basketball jacket and ran downstairs to meet her mom’s disapproving stare and undergo her inspection—a tiring game of tug-of-war that had become their new Sunday morning ritual. It was about her clothes, of course. It always was. And it was getting worse the older she got.

  Today Jess was clad in a Culture Club concert T-shirt that was not fully covered by her jacket and jeans that had holes in the knees and a flap of material hanging down from them that showed off part of her shin. Judging from her mother’s expression, her garb was a complete disaster.

  “No,” her mother said simply. “What part of ‘Sunday best’ do you not understand?”

  Jess rolled her eyes, astounded as always by the strictest of any of her mother’s rules—church clothes had to be chosen from what Jess considered the silliest looking things in her closet. They weren’t the only issue, of course. Carolyn had been raised in the fifties, when girls were taught to look and act a certain way. Ivy was very compliant when it came to proper church attire and even the genteel way she carried herself. Jess was the opposite in every way—a lanky girl who was amazingly coordinated in sports, but who off the court had the grace of a drunken bull.

  “Dungarees?” her mother said in a tight voice.

  “They’re called jeans,” Jess corrected.

  Seeing that her mother wasn’t going to budge…

  “Ugh!” Jess moaned and stomped back up the stairs.

  She selected a nicer, button-down shirt while looking absently at a Boy George poster on her wall. The Aimes family had argued for days before Jess was finally allowed to go to Nashville to see the Culture Club concert. Her father believed it would harm her moral foundation and especially wanted to make sure no one in town knew she was going, while her mother thought it was harmless. It would be known as the Great Fight of 1983. Reluctantly, her dad gave in, and her mother took her and her brother and sister to see it. Jess was mesmerized, thinking it very cool how a man could wear eyeliner and lipstick in public. She dragged a reluctant Ivy to the stage where Boy George grazed their waving hands. On the way home, her mother and Ivy said they liked the music. Danny called Boy George a “fag.”

  “Don�
�t say that.” Carolyn’s voice was sharp.

  “Look at what he was wearing!” Danny exclaimed. He was referring to a Raggedy Ann-esque shirt that came down to his knees.

  “I like him,” Jess said defiantly. She’d been impressed with more than the music that night. But she wondered, because he was so famous, was that why all the shrieking in the auditorium? After all, they were still in Nashville. If a man like Boy George was walking down the street and no one knew who he was, he might have been beaten up.

  They arrived home at one in the morning. Of course, her father was awake, worried that they’d been in a car accident because it was so late. Her mother calmed him down and refused to tell him anything about the concert, knowing that any detail would only make it worse.

  Jess studied her poster more closely. He got away with makeup. Jess figured that he had either had to run away from home or both of his parents had to be dead. Whatever the case, she knew he’d never have survived in Greens Fork.

  Jess envied him, the way he seemed to live life on his own terms. She couldn’t wait until her parents weren’t telling her how to look or act anymore, when she could be truly free.

  She studied her outfit in the mirror over her dresser, peering past the basketball trophies proudly displayed there—the only things that belonged completely to her, that no one in her family criticized. Her dad mostly ignored them, but at least he didn’t have anything bad to say about them.

  The car horn honked.

  She pulled off her jacket and, in a frenzy, ran back through the stuffed closet, filled with clothes she hardly ever wore. Finally, she came to the least awful thing—a nice navy blue knit blazer. She breathed in deeply and prepared herself for round two. Before leaving her room, she straightened the photo wedged inside the bureau mirror, a photo of two five-year-old girls—a blonde and a brunette—laughing after doing a skit in kindergarten. The blonde was clinging to the brunette, in spite of the brunette’s insistence on putting a construction paper duck hat on her head.