Girlchild

by Tupelo Hassman

  trigger

  After I began my correspondence with Grandma, she begged me to stop addressing her as Grandma Gun, a name I’d held on to for its fierceness and fight and written boldly across the front of every envelope I sent her way. That is, until the letter came that called him, in capital letters and haggard underline, a Vile Memory. Grandma underlined her maiden name for me too, saying she’d rather be a Crumb than a Gun any day. So old Gun was retired, Grandma Crumb it was, and the real why of it all was never discussed. However many we send, letters don’t keep Grandma close enough for Mama, though, and the secrets they try to share long-distance spill out in her sleep, Vile Memories with them. They race up my arms as I tuck her in, surge under my skin, creep the way bugs do. Insects started out as Mama’s fear but like her wedding ring and the hope chest, it’s one of those things I’m inheriting. Her dyslexia saved her from what she couldn’t face straight on, but I don’t have any trouble reading Gun’s swarming of Mama at night.

  word jumble

  Make as many words as you can using letters from the following word. Do not repeat a letter if it is not repeated in the original word. (You have one childhood to complete this portion of the test.)

  INSECT

  dyslexikx

  Mama’s first car was a pretty blue Chevy Corvair bought for her by her first and only husband, Gene. Gene got it thinking to free himself from having to drive her on all the errands a family needs done, but in the end the Corvair freed him from a lot more than errand-running, and Mama too. The key to that freedom was hidden just under the front seat, close enough that Mama’s curious fingers brushed against it when she went to slide the seat forward on her first drive down from their cabin on a Santa Cruz mountain and into town. Tucked under the seat, forgotten by the car’s previous owner, was a library book, and for Mama it was long overdue.

  When everything you need to know to get through life is written on box tops, recipe cards, and collection notices, reading through a whole book seems like a mighty waste of time, especially if you have problems with letters, like Mama does. “They go ass-backwards,” she says, “and if I’m tired they don’t stay still at all.” But if you just got your first car and you’re feeling around for the seat lever and find Desolation Angels instead, the beautiful people on its cover so lazily entwined, well, that’s the type of experience that can turn your head around.

  And when Mama finally drove her Corvair down the mountain again, to the library this time to return that book, she would’ve paid the fine too if they’d asked her, guilty as she was for all the time she’d kept it, the days and nights spent while her boys ran wild and the ironing heaped high, each page a headache of squinting until the words clicked like the tumbler in a lock and the page could finally be turned with a surprised and secret hallelujah. After dropping that first book through the library’s return slot, she showed her new driver’s license, filled out a form, and left with two more Kerouac books under her arm, the orange card of the Santa Cruz Public Library in her wallet, her name having been misspelled by the librarian across the front, Mrs. Joann R. Hendrikx.

  Before long, Mrs. Hendrikx’s library card number, No. 21431, was stamped on the inside of every Kerouac book on the Santa Cruz Library’s shelves. I don’t know how much credit old Jack deserves for the fire his writing lit in Mama’s life. There’s such a thing as the right book at the right time, and for Mama and many others, Kerouac’s was it. Whether he liked it or not there was something like a revolution going on as his books came out, especially in Santa Cruz where Tibetan prayer flags still wave more proudly than Old Glory. Every revolution needs a voice, and in 1969 Kerouac’s voice was loud enough to catch the ear of a recent divorcée who, though not well-bred, was getting well-read, and thinking about a revolution of her own.

  Letters still refuse to behave for Mama but she doesn’t let that get in her way. There are books on our shelves to prove it, not dusty candles and dime-store glass won at Circus Circus, not pictures of family and plaques offering the same advice from one trailer to the next: Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee. I’m not a slow cook / I’m not a fast cook / I’m a half-fast cook. God grant me patience and I want it right now. When the men Mama brings home see the names lining our shelves, Kerouac and Kesey, Gilman and Ginsberg, the traveling Buddha tucked in a corner, they tend to catch their breath and quiet a bit, not sure whether they stumbled into a library somehow or drank themselves clear through to Sunday and woke up at church. Santa Cruz couldn’t be further behind us and all our books come from the Salvation Army now, because Carson County, Nevada, officials haven’t yet seen fit to shuttle the bookmobile this far up the 395, but Mama’s old Santa Cruz Public Library card doesn’t leave her wallet. No. 21431 was her ticket out, once, and she needs the reminder.

  spelling bee

  I win a set of Academic American Encyclopedias and two wide-winged trophies. I win a trip to Kmart’s parking-lot sale to get a new dress to wear to the statewide competition and I win the weird, confused pride of my mama. Mama says she has no spelling smarts but she finds her way through all our books, fights her way through all the letters, so that only leaves her saying it to make it true, just like Grandma said. She says that I didn’t get it from her, couldn’t have, a mix-up at the hospital, she laughs, embarrassed. By me. It’s like I was never a part of her, like I hatched out of a spider egg instead, crawled out of somebody else’s anthill, like I flew out of a honeycomb with a dictionary under my arm. Mama acts like I don’t belong to her anymore. And her saying it is just making that true too. And that’s just fine. Because I never feel, I never ever feel, like Mama belongs to me. The only place I feel like myself and the only person who treats me normal is Mrs. Reddick, the librarian. In her library I can sit and let all the words leap and run and I don’t have to pretend it’s harder than it is to have them make sense, like I do at home. Mrs. Reddick doesn’t have a thing to say about how fast I read or where it comes from or why. I come in, she smiles and nods, I smile and nod, and then I open my book and read until the bell. That’s it. I’m no alien and nobody’s miracle, I’m just a reader right at home.

  The only time it was ever different was right after the Hardware Man left, when I came back to school the first day after the snowstorm that left Mama and me alone with my secrets, the first day after the fist-storm that followed. Mrs. Reddick’s smile that recess took longer in coming than usual. Her eyes held on to mine for such a long time, I felt like I was reading them too and what they said, about worry and being glad I was there, felt too loud for a library. The look was enough to make a librarian say “Shhhh!” and Mrs. Reddick must have scolded herself, because she bent her head politely to her stacks and I sat down.

  an illustrated book about birds

  Mrs. Buchanan finds me in the library at recess. She’s got something in a paper bag that I know is from the drugstore because of the way the brown paper creases tight. Mrs. Buchanan is Mr. Lombroso’s secretary and her clothes never get tired of fitting, never wrinkle, and circles never show up under her arms. She’s so pretty that, the first time they met, Mama said, “I wonder what Mrs. Lombroso thinks about that.” When she sits in the chair next to me her perfume is so sweet that my mouth goes dry and she says, “Principal Lombroso asked me to check on your preparations for the Spelling Bee final. Have you been looking through the dictionary?”

  I wish I was sitting closer to the big dictionary and not right here in plain sight with Flowers for Algernon in my hand, but I can at least see it from here. I’m figuring out that whatever’s in the bag must be for me, maybe a notebook, and I want a notebook, so I look hard at the dictionary and say, “Yes, I’ve been looking at it.” Mrs. Reddick is hovering an aisle away in Bird Watching and I know she’s listening because no one ever messes around in Bird Watching so there can’t be anything to tidy up there. But out of the corner of my eye I can see she doesn’t flinch at what she knows is my giant lie, and Mrs. Buchanan must believe me, because she sounds relieved. “Th
at’s very good. You can’t spend too much time with it, dear. Do you have one at home?” We do, of course, it’s at Mama’s elbow, but I wonder if I said no would Mrs. Buchanan come back tomorrow with a dictionary hidden in a paper bag so the other kids wouldn’t know I was her new favorite? I imagine her house, off the Calle, with deep carpets that show the vacuum lines and a bedroom ready for a little girl of her own, with a brass headboard and too many pillows in the shapes of circles and hearts, pillows that don’t do anything but take up space. I want to say I don’t have one so she’ll invite me home after school to use hers, and bring me hot chocolate while I turn the pages, but I figure one lie is enough and from the corner of my eye I can see Mrs. Reddick, a drawing of a hummingbird flutters from the cover of the book she’s holding, and I tell the truth.

  “Of course you do, dear,” Mrs. Buchanan says, smiling, and pushes the bag across the table at me. “Mr. Lombroso and I wanted you to have these for the Championship.” I’m excited when she says “these,” because that means two notebooks or a pocket dictionary and a notebook, maybe, and I reach into the bag, but what’s inside doesn’t have anything to do with spelling. What’s inside is a pair of tights in a package that says “Perfect Girl Seamless.” There’s a picture of a perfect girl on the front. She’s leaning against white steps that lead up to nothing and her legs are an unnatural and seamless shade of cream that doesn’t match the rest of her at all. Mrs. Buchanan says, “Do you know how to put these on?” and I don’t, but before I have to admit it, Mrs. Reddick drops the book she’s been holding, the hummingbird crashes on the counter, and she comes over to our table and says to Mrs. Buchanan in a way that only librarians know how to do, in a whisper that sounds like it came over the loudspeaker straight from the principal’s office, “This is a library, not a dressing room, Diane.”

  Mrs. Buchanan’s face goes red, and for the first time I notice how silly she looks in the kid-sized chair. She gets up and I notice that her legs are an odd shade of cream that doesn’t match the rest of her at all, but her earrings and bracelet and necklace that catch and shine in the fluorescent light do all match, gold squares hugging into each other. If I lived at her house I’d probably have to go around matching stuff all day, the sheets to the pillowcases, the towels to the washcloths, and she probably doesn’t have a dictionary, anyway, because there’s something improper about a dictionary, the way it stays open to the last thing you didn’t know, there’s nothing seamless about that, nothing perfect. So I match my tone to Mrs. Buchanan’s perfume and say sweetly, “Thank you very much.”

  We listen to Mrs. Buchanan’s heels clicking at a proper pace toward her office, and when the sweet library silence returns, Mrs. Reddick picks up the copy of Flowers for Algernon I was reading before Mrs. Buchanan came in and looks at its cover.

  “This book is often banned in libraries.” She hands it back to me, open to my page. “There are many ways to define intelligence, Ms. Hendrix,” she says, as she puts the package of Perfect Girl Seamless tights back inside their brown paper bag, “and most of them, as you are already discovering, are completely inadequate.”

  shell

  Under Arts and Crafts in the Girl Scout Handbook, there is a section on design and the symbol on its proficiency badge is a conventionalized flower. Not an orchid, sultry and moist, not a gladiola, ruffled and tall, but a conventionalized flower, petals uniform and polite. If you’ve never had the pleasure, a conventionalized flower is one so sturdy and dull the weeds don’t even try to choke it dry, preferring instead to fight with the beauties at the other end of the yard. The Girl Scouts and V. White have one thing in common: they like to play it safe. V. White didn’t ask how far Mama could go, just how far a person like Mama has to go. She was only interested in the shortest distance between Mama being on welfare and earning enough to stay broke without welfare’s help, or better yet, figuring out why Mama didn’t stay married just enough to keep off the dole altogether. As far as V. White was concerned, there was no reason for the County to send Mama to college and be made smart when, for less time and less money, she could go to vocational school and be made useful. I doubt it’s what V. White had in mind, but Mama does make herself useful now, pulling taps and making change, and her collar is as blue as my eyes.

  Girl Scouts learn useful stuff. Proficiency badges can be earned in all kinds of fields. Except academic. There’s nothing in the Handbook’s index under Science or History, no listings for English or Math, but there’s loads to do under Arts and Crafts and there’s much good work to be accomplished in, say, Child Care or Nutrition, that would lead the dedicated Girl Scout into just the type of vocational training program V. White mentions in her initial report on Mama.

  In the Handbook’s section on design, under “How to Begin,” there are three simple drawings of a bird in a row and the question: Do you want to use a bird in your design? I hadn’t thought of it, but if I’m here to learn how to draw and if all they’re offering is birds, my answer to this question, like my mama’s answer to the question, Would you like to earn a certificate that would bring you financial independence? is: you bet your sweet ass I do. I do want to use a bird in my design.

  Pigeon and her husband started the Truck Stop when the Calle de las Flores was just a twinkling rhinestone in some developer’s eye and they kept the bar going even after the major plans for building up the area fell apart. But when her husband made one too many trips across the pavement to tip a waitress working at Hobee’s, Pigeon took a trip down to the courthouse before her husband had time to cross back again.

  “Birds are hatched from eggs and are always egg-shaped.” That’s Girl Scout advice for drawing birds. You start by drawing the egg and from there it’s easy to draw the rest. In the Handbook’s examples, the first bird is only an egg, the next, an egg with a head. The third bird has legs and feet and feathers.

  Pigeon filed for divorce and hocked her wedding ring to pay for new locks on the doors and cash drawer of the Truck Stop, with a little left over for new vinyl to cover its barstools. “That’s something I liked about Jo right away,” she tells me, “she wasn’t one of those fool women who toss their ring into the Truckee and cry poor me. I could tell right off, Jo was smart enough to make use of what God gave her and hold on to whatever else she picked up along the way.” Pigeon got over her husband, but she could never get over all the engagement rings thrown by shortsighted divor-cées to the bottom of the Truckee, the rings’ glimmer lost on the river’s trout. The wedding ring Mama still insisted on wearing made sense to Pigeon, and she may have been the only one on the Calle who took its meaning. Pigeon wanted someone she could trust not to run off with the first good old boy who tipped regular. While Mama may have been looking for a good time, by the time we got to the Calle she had all the jewelry she needed and more than enough of husbands.

  Draw an egg, the Handbook says, or model an egg-shaped piece of clay, and “hatch out” a bird. I look through the Birds from Every Continent section in the encyclopedia, searching for one kind whose body doesn’t look like an egg, upright or sideways, but from loon to blue jay, ostrich to starling, all their shapes agree. Take this one to the bank: birds are hatched from eggs and are always egg-shaped. Maybe there’s no escaping the shape that molds you, no getting around how you got started even if you do break out. I haven’t found a mirror yet that doesn’t reflect the curves of the Calle back at me, my dirty ways, my fragile teeth and bad skin, my hands that won’t stop picking at themselves. The Girl Scouts win again. And maybe V. White does too. Except for one thing. Wings are born from that shape. They don’t come from any other.

  the state

  It’s the final round of the statewide competition and I get

  A-L-I-M-E-N-T-A-R-Y

  and then I get

  H-A-L-F-P-E-N-N-Y

  but I don’t have any time for their subtle homonyms and sneaky, silent l’s and f’s, because all the while I’m just thinking about my new dress. Not just new-to-me, but new-brand-new with or
ange flowers and ruffly sleeves and a price tag I had to cut off with scissors. I’m going to wear it for school pictures and make double sure that none of its frills turn upside down like last year’s Salvation Army special, or the years before, when my pigtails hurt and I was scared of the flash.

  There is only one more word to go, and I look out at Mama, small in the crowd of sweater sets that swarm around her where she sits straight in her best jeans and a new blouse she spent forty-five minutes ironing, a world record in our house, and still she went on to do my hair without cursing and only pulled once. Mama sits tall like everyone else but her face is the only one here that looks how mine feels, on picture day or any other. Like maybe she’s in the wrong place. And when the Pronouncer says my last word, I feel an insect curl in my throat and the auditorium goes quiet until she asks, “Would you like the word used in a sentence? Perhaps?” and I nod, mouth dumb but eyes smart, eyes on Mama.

  The words chase around the walls of the auditorium but I don’t follow them because I’m thinking about Mama’s sentence. Mama’s life. How she never talks about how she reads all the time because she’s never had a breath to spare for feeling proud of herself, and now that I’m here, she never will. Mama’s already read up to Ech-Fa in the Academic American Encyclopedias I won and haven’t barely opened yet, except to write Rory D. Hendrix on the inside cover of each volume with the gold and maroon pen Mr. Lombroso gave me for getting to the State Championship. At least that’s what he said, but I know it’s for getting Roscoe Elementary School out of the Reno Gazette’s police blotter for once and onto the front page for that same once, even if it was at the bottom. Mr. Lombroso got a raise and I got a pen. The brand-new pen made my name feel brand-new even though I could tell Mama recognized her curls in my R’s and y’s and D.’s by the way her smile pressed tight over her teeth.