How you doing back there, kid? My father moves his arm back to give me three quick pats on the cheek. He does this when he’s in trouble—loves me like this. It’s his way of reminding my mother that he can function in the world in more ways than one. He can be a father, a family man, and also the Big Boss.
I don’t say a word either. I love my father more than anyone, for reasons I have yet to understand, but I feel more loyal to my mother. This is what I write about in my diary most days, though I haven’t stacked up the logic. All I know is that I want my father to enjoy our car ride together, but I will also bite his hand if it comes near me again.
You know, honey, if the kid wasn’t in the backseat—
My mother looks at him now, though she still says nothing.
I’m just sitting here thinking to myself: Self, if the kid wasn’t here and all—
She smiles, slanted and deviant.
People would find me, you know, he says. The Everglades—typical. Police would troll this place first. If the kid wasn’t here … you know your kid is in here, right? She’s no dummy even if you think so. She’s watching all of this. She’s old enough to talk. Can somebody fucking say something?
If the kid wasn’t here. I am used to these words.
We finally pull up to a wooden fence, a damp field. In the middle of the field there’s a basket the size of a small car. Beside the basket, a striped sheet of reds and purples rippling far across the grass like a bloody sea.
What’s all this now?
A balloon ride.
I don’t do heights.
Happy birthday, you fucking fat cow.
What we are is up in the air. My mother stands in the corner of the balloon basket, all on her own, loving it. She closes her eyes and stretches her arms to feel the first hot slab of sunrise. She looks so peaceful here, just like this, and I know she would jump if she could, if she could do it fast enough, before getting caught and dragged back in by her sneakers. She could tilt her weight headfirst and leave us here—simple. Years later, when she swallows a bottle of pills and survives the overdose, I’ll wonder if she considers this moment on the balloon—the sun, clear air, Kealani—what could have been a sure thing.
Can we quiet it down a sec? says my father. I need a sec. I need to relax.
Can’t, captain, says our balloon man. He wears overalls. Tiny, fish teeth. His name, we learn, is Dwayne. Dwayne turns a valve to get the fire going every couple of minutes. It’s a deafening blast, meant to keep the balloon warmer than the atmosphere, meant to keep us afloat.
I have never seen my father afraid of anything, but here he is, knuckles bulging like popcorn, his chest thumping wild. He stares down, and then up, and then back at me, shaking. The day stings against my arms.
I need something to drink or I’ll be sick, says my father.
Aye, aye, captain. Dwayne opens the mouth of a cooler, uncorks a bottle of champagne into the dirty rag in his fist. He pours the gold liquid into a plastic chute until it dribbles over. He hands it to my father, who chugs it down. The foam catches on the scratch of his chin.
What is this? Pepsi?
It’s what we’ve got, sir.
I need a drink.
Sir, it’s all we have.
I’ll drink the fuel, says my father, looking up into the flames. Dwayne laughs a vibrating cackle and pats my father on the back. Dwayne is the only one laughing. I look at the fuel tanks in the center of the basket. I count them.
Up here, the only sound from below is the dogs. After the valve is opened, after each burst of heat, the dogs bark in unison all over South Florida. I can’t tell if they feel terrified or empowered by our sound, but somehow I feel safe with them down there, in time with our flight, listening. I look at the Everglades, the strands of water swerving up to the highways, like something ophidian.
If I screamed, would the dogs hear that, too? I ask.
Prob’ly not, says Dwayne. It’s the pitch is all wrong.
I know this, of course. I am a very quiet girl. Even the dogs would miss me.
Nice birthday gift your honey got you here, Dwayne says to my father. Renting out the whole gig like this. Pretty penny.
I got money, says my father. His face is shining with sweat. He rests his forehead against his arms crossed on the edge of the basket, lifts it, sets it down, lifts it, sets it down. I grab his wrist and dig my thumb into the soft underside of it, something he has done for me before, on boats, when I am yakking into the deep blue. Let it out, he has said, chum the boat.
Got the life, don’t you? says Dwayne.
Guess so, says my father.
Some life we got, says my mother.
I have a pony, I say.
We’ve got money, says my father.
In twenty minutes, it’s time to land. The winds have picked up, and our balloon is headed south, toward Miami.
Can’t you just turn it around? asks my father.
You can’t steer a balloon, says Dwayne, you ride Mother Nature.
Dwayne focuses on dials, flips switches, and ties cords around a hook to open some vents in the balloon. He wants to level out the air temperature, he says, until we fall. Ropes slide in and out of his hands.
Chase car will come get us, he says, wherever we land. God’s judgment from here.
God is dead, says my father.
Can’t we ride it all the way into the ocean? says my mother.
I can’t swim, I say. Remember?
They don’t.
As we descend, the dogs get louder. I think I hear every single one of them. The wind carries us west in rapid jerks, and my father sinks down inside the balloon until he is sitting, clasping his knees.
We won’t make a field, Dwayne says. Hold on.
We float down to a cul-de-sac where every house is painted in a Candy Land palette. I pick a favorite house—mint colored, like my Auntie T’s—and squeeze the wicker as we inch closer and closer to it. Dwayne leans with his ropes. Incoming!
Our basket skids across the shingles of the minty house’s roof. The shingles flip like the scales of a gator. A few ping off. We bonk off the cullis as Dwayne tugs at more cords, lets more air in and out of our balloon. He does not panic as a man exits the house in his bathrobe.
The hell you doing, landing on my house!
We hit the man’s lawn with a thud. The basket begins to tip as the envelope of the balloon gets caught up with another wind. My mother laughs maniacally, clapping her hands. My father opens the basket door and collapses on the grass.
Who’s paying for this roof? the man screams. Look at this roof! The bald sheen of his head is amazing.
Happy birthday, my mother says to no one.
Good excuse for a home makeover! says Dwayne.
I want to go again, I say.
I hop out of the basket and find my legs. I watch my father crawl his way across the lawn, dry heaving, pulling clumps of grass between his fingers. As a boy, my father made a black cape with a chain around the neck and wore it everywhere: the dentist’s office, the dinner table, school, Temple. The neighbor kids teased him so badly his mother threw it away.
He stands up, wipes the dirt from his pockets.
JUST ONE LOOK IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS
The mole is brown and speckled and sprouted with a few wired hairs. It’s on my left hand, just above my wrist, the size of the diamond on my mother’s ring finger. It matches her mole—she reminds me of this—as she holds her delicate hand out next to mine, comparing.
But my mother’s mole looks elegant, a black beauty mark.
I hate my mole.
I hate every new part of my body that curves and bumps and swells and darkens as the years go on.
One night, alone in our kitchen, I pull the largest, sharpest knife from the block. I don’t know why I choose a knife so big. I suppose I like the severity of it. I rest my hand on the cutting board on the island in the center of our kitchen. Without thinking much about it, I catch the knife at the base of th
e mole, gnaw onto my lip, brace for it. When the knife cracks down onto the wood, the mole is not gone—it’s dangling. It’s grey now, dead looking, like a single Sno-Caps candy. I cut the rest of the way. I am very professional about this operation.
I press wads of paper towels to the wound. I press, press. When I take it off, the blood and hole where my mole used to be glimmers like a garnet under the kitchen lights.
One month later, the mole grows back. It’s a different color this time—cream.
Then the speckles come back. The hairs.
But we matched, says my mother. How could you hurt yourself like that, and take off the way we matched? She had cleaned up the blood. My mother did.
The next time, I use a smaller knife. In my bathroom.
I’m found out in the car, my hand dripping blood all over the taupe leather seats.
What the hell is wrong with you?
Blood stained the carpet of our Jaguar. It stained my dress. It was so red. Beautiful, like lace, the way it spread out.
The scar on my hand is subtle.
WOMANLY THINGS
Penelope does not want to be a ballerina anymore. She wants her name shortened to Lee, her clothes more threadbare, used. She’s my new friend Misty’s older sister, and lately she’s been playing the guitar for us—Fiona Apple, the Cranberries—her hair twisted in a long, slick braid, her words too big for either one of us to understand. Lee just began high school—five years older than we are—so Misty and I have taken to spying on her, asking every kind of question. We take our mental notes.
Because Lee likes to eat stir-fry, we eat it, too. She likes to balance baby corns like Jenga blocks, so I do this, too. When she begins writing songs, Misty and I write some, too. Lee’s songs are about aching for and missing random stuff. The past, her innocence, a bag of jelly beans, camp. She strums an acoustic guitar pressed against her bare stomach, whisper-humming the words with her eyes squeezed closed.
Misty and I write about Jewish boys becoming men, the echo range of seashells, a secret place in the sky. We write about blonde girls and their supreme blonde beauty and about how nobody will ever love us because we are neither blonde nor beautiful (When I see you, my heart melts down / Down so far I sink to the ground / But when I see you with that dumb blonde / I scream to myself, What have I done wrong?). Misty is white, with a real kid-like body, and we both suffer from freckles. We sing about this until our throats crack like radio static. We call our two-person act Kotton Kandy. We rename each other Sparkle (Misty) and Shimmer (me), promising to get out of Boca one day, pay for matching boob jobs, and forget who it was we were.
Lee listens to each one of our songs, nodding her head. She records us on a video camera with her hand balanced beneath a padded strap. She tells us we have potential. We believe her so much we keep writing, rehearsing, harmonizing, performing outside her bedroom.
You’ve got to really feel the music, she says. Feel it like you’re inside of it.
Misty and I take turns calling the 800 number for The Box music video channel, punching in serial numbers to request Britney, Christina, Mandy, Jessica. We suck on Warheads and wait for our girls to appear, carefully learning their hair flips and choreographies, the shapes and characteristics of their belly buttons.
On her boom box, Lee blasts a song about going down on a man in a theater.
This is Alanis Morissette, she says. Take notes on this attitude. Take notes on the feeling.
Later, when I ask my mother what it means to go down on someone in a theater, she tells me it’s a way that two people share popcorn. Everybody does it.
Back home, on my Uncle Whack’s black box of cable, I’ve found something I quite like. On channels 590–595, naked people fuck each other. They say this word all the time on the channels. They say Fuck my face, and I’m going to fuck you stupid till your brain shoots out of your ears, and Get over here, my little fucktoy. Once, after school, Misty and I took turns saying the word—fuck—the first time for us both while we hung from the school monkey bars. We whispered it at first, repeated it back and forth until we built some momentum, and after a minute or two we were screaming it—FUCK!—until we laughed so hard it felt like ghosts were crying out of our faces.
When I’m alone, though, I can’t stop thinking about It, that burn that makes me want to turn the television off but also keep it running forever. I discovered It around the time of Jet’s letters, and then again, recently, in the bathtub, the showerhead turned all the way to level three. It is all I can think about lately; I can’t seem to stop. It’s like a fist grabs hold of my brain, squeezing it, until my own thoughts pop out and suddenly I’ve got somebody else’s crazy thoughts. I like to go until it hurts.
I tell Misty none of this. It only happens alone. But when I get to folding my pillows in half and straddling them at night, sometimes I hear the pike of my Grandma Rose’s voice. The first time I tried to swat a mosquito from my arm, she pinched me by the chin, screaming That could be your grandfather! Every fly is somebody dead and sacred. Every cockroach is watching. I wonder if my ancestors know about the showerhead, the hairbrush, the pencil, the pillow lumps, the candlestick, the toothbrush; if they’re screaming Ai yah! from a spider web somewhere beneath my bathroom sink.
Lee goes to a special art school and hangs out with other former ballerinas. The metallic spandex and blossoms of tulle are long gone, only present in the framed photographs her mother hangs on the wall in a perfect, chronological row. Some of Lee’s friends have short hair, shaved like a boy’s, and Misty and I have never seen any grown girl (who’s not a mom) with this kind of hair before, and we laugh about it, ask Lee why her friends do it. Why the baggy pants? Why this look? Why don’t you all wear glitter on your eyes like high schoolers are allowed to do? You’re supposed to look sexy, we say. You’re supposed to wear tight, womanly things—things that hug you in all of your womanly places.
Misty is still a ballerina. I show up to her classes in East Boca and wait behind the glass. I attend every recital and Nutcracker performance because it’s nice to support my friend, but it’s even nicer to watch her teacher, Jaqueline, kick-kick her legs in a leotard. I can see every dent of her body under that skin-like fabric. I can even see her breathing.
Whenever Lee brings her friends over, Misty and I sled down the staircase on linen couch cushions. We usually get snagged somewhere in the middle and tumble the rest of the way down. Lee takes our cushions under her armpits and leads us back up to Misty’s room. She looks sad in the doorway the way adults often do, and she says, Can you please just leave us alone tonight? Can you guys just listen to Hanson or take your quizzes or write your songs? Anything?
Misty and I love the Hanson brothers. We love their high-pitched voices, their shoulder-length golden hair. I wonder what kind of conditioner they use, I say. My hair is cut like the top of a mushroom so that it fits neatly beneath my riding helmet, and because I refused to brush my hair—it was not my choice. I think these boys look more womanly than me.
I kiss Misty’s posters on the wall, and she says, Ew, get your slobber off my Taylor! We move on to our magazines and take the quizzes in back to learn what category of flirt we could be. Between each quiz, we play a round of Our Game. In Our Game, we try to predict our sexual futures. We tell each other what our future boys and men might look like—I’m going to lose my V-card to a boy with long, long hair, like Hanson, I say. A boy who is cute, but also, pretty. We predict where these boys will take us. Where they will kiss us one day. Where they will fuck us. Rapids Water Park, Misty says, for my V-card. I want it in the lazy river, on a doughnut tube, under the water where nobody has to know.
When I am not watching channels 590–595 in my parents’ bedroom, when I am not thinking about Monica Lewinsky and her wet cigar, when It hits, I’ve been returning to an airplane with the Wicked Witch of the West. I’m enjoying my flight, seat reclined, drinking an orange soda from a plastic cup, until the Wicked Witch tells me I’ve had enough. She pulls
a piece of sharp metal from beneath my seat, some sort of necessary safety appliance, and she lifts my uniform school skirt, shoves the metal up between my legs. After that, she wraps a fresh diaper around these parts until the tape slices into my hips. I want to suck the mole off her face. The Witch opens the emergency door, as if to admire the view. She tells me to come, come, look out at the world, before she pushes me out of the plane and into the sky. I go soaring off into the bent horizon of blue, and eventually land in a field of sawgrass, ass first, the metal piece impaling me under my diaper, stabbing out my insides. It feels good. I spit up ribbons of red into the grass. The Wicked Witch tells me I’m a very sweet girl, that I’ve done a fine job. She rubs my back in small circles.
When my hands stop, when I yank my eyes open, it takes minutes to blink away the color green. I’m so sorry, I say, to no one in particular, waiting for that witch to die out with my ceiling full of stars.
One school night, during Our Game, Misty and I hear Lee click open the front door for her friend Paula. We stand at the top of the stairs to say Hello. Paula is the pretty-boy type, I think. Her parachute pants hang below the knobs of her hipbones, and she’s not wearing a bra. Go back in your room, says Lee. She is more stern than usual, more guarded about this friend. She takes Paula’s hand and leads her to the couch. She flicks off the lights. Go to bed, okay?
We go to our room. Ears up against the door. We want to know what Lee and Paula are talking about more than we’ve ever wanted anything. A few minutes go by before Misty says, Let’s get some ice cream. I like this excuse.
Yes, I say. I need it now.
We open our door and tiptoe down the stairs. Lee and Paula are still on the living room couch. Their limbs are interwoven like cat’s cradle strings. The television turns their skin deep purples and blues, though we cannot see what it is they are watching. What we see is Lee’s heart-shaped face on Paula’s shoulder, and then Paula’s hand on Lee’s head, and then a lift, a look, their two noses coming together, fingers rubbing the baby hairs around their ears. They kiss for a long while, and I think I must be dreaming. Misty’s eyes go wobbly with shine, and she jerks my hand, leading the way back up to her room.
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Page 3
