Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

by T Kira Madden

  Back to Our Game, she says. I want a French boy, in Paris. He’ll take me on his scooter and we’ll eat fancy bread and cheese and we’ll fuck slowly to a Brandy song.

  During a fifth-grade field trip, our class goes to the movies. We see Forces of Nature, starring Ben Affleck, who is afraid of airplanes, and Sandra Bullock, who is much braver than that. I sit between Misty and Duke Freeman, who goes by Devilish Dukie, and my mother sits behind us as a chaperone (all the class moms take turns, but the kids like when it’s my mom; she’s the chillest, and she even let us watch a bootleg VHS of Titanic in our hotel room—naked scene and all—when we took a class trip to Disney). Duke looks like a Hanson brother. His lips are a deep pink, his hair like corn silk. I want any excuse to talk to Duke during the movie, so when Sandra and Ben are somewhere on the road, I reach over into Duke’s popcorn bag, lean into his ear, and ask, sincerely, May I go down on you?

  Duke does not understand my request, but, somehow, my mother hears it.

  After the movie, when we are back home, she tells me not to share popcorn anymore.

  Popcorn, and Alanis Morissette, she says, are best enjoyed when you’re older.

  I mention Paula and Lee the morning after we watched them from the stairs. What do you think they were doing? I ask Misty. Do you think Paula slept over?

  I don’t think they were doing anything, she says.

  We never got the ice cream, I say.

  You watch too many movies, she says. You get confused.

  I ask about the incident for weeks, almost every day, until Misty tells me to stop asking. I wrote my sister an e-mail about it, she says, just to make sure.

  Did your sister write back?

  They’re just friends, Misty says. Best friends.

  Like us?

  We never see Paula again, but from then on, when I write our love songs, I write them with Lee and Paula in mind. I want to live inside that feeling, fumble my way through it, the way Lee taught us. I think about that haircut, my craving for ice cream; their hands had such purpose. I think about the look just before the happening.

  SHOW NAME

  Uncle Whack isn’t really my uncle, and his hair isn’t really white. He bleaches it to look this way, shaves the sides of his head clean to get a stripe of skunkish Mohawk. He’s my real Uncle Kai’s best friend, and they are trying to get sober together; they are keeping their hands busy. Uncle Whack’s the one who rigged up the illegal satellite dish on our roof and the “black box” with an infinity of cable. He shoves playing cards into the box, sometimes a spent matchbook. This trips the system, he says, Abracadabra.

  My two uncles like to hammer up on our roof while I’m trying to study Latin. They mow the lawn, scrub our water tanks. They pour jugs of chlorine and chemicals into our fountain out front until it looks carbonated. My mother is proud of her little brother and his friend. She knows they’re trying to be good, and clean from dope, which is something she also wants very badly for herself. When my uncles are not fixing up the house for cash, they’re making calls for my father. In our living room, all of them scream at people on the phone and sell stocks for someone named Jordan Belfort. This is something I won’t understand until the day I do.

  My parents are leaving town again. So mega lucky, say the kids at school. Rich parents, all those vacays. Do you get back souvenirs? Pets? But I’m never really sure where they go. Last month, I know my father went to South Africa to visit my half brothers, who live in Johannesburg with their mother. I know this because my father got into some sort of trouble on the plane. Some men in suits decided that smoking in the sky is dangerous, a menace, and banned it just a few days before his nineteen-hour flight. At the fifth hour, my father snuck a smoke in the airplane bathroom with his head in the toilet, flushing every few seconds to suck the evidence down. He returned home with some stories about this incident, and a mousetrap-sized metal dulcimer for me.

  What would you say to Uncle Whack taking care of you this week, huh? Does that sound like fun? Uncle Whack can take you to Blockbuster. I bet he’ll even watch you ride! My mother is using the voice she uses when she wants something. It climbs up and down octaves—a sing-song, composed, motherly pitch.

  But where are you going now?

  A romantic getaway, okay? Don’t worry about that, okay? We need mommy-daddy time. And next week, Daddy will take you to Vegas.

  Okay.

  I don’t want Uncle Whack to watch me ride horses. Riding is the only thing in the world that’s my own. I took my dad for a ride only once, in North Carolina, around my birthday in July. He slung his right leg over an Appaloosa named Trigger, hooked his Gucci leather loafers into the western stirrups, and let me adjust his heels. I led him up Smith Mountain in a winding trot. My father smoked with his lips while both hands gripped the saddle horn, which I found particularly impressive.

  Son, he said. What do I do about, how do I go about, how do I—I forgot to wear underwear.

  Pick a side and move it all over, I said. I didn’t know what it meant when I said it, but I’d heard this question and answer before with other men, on other trails.

  My father wore a face bunched in pain for the rest of the trail. He couldn’t keep his toes up, his shoulders square; he looked completely amateur, sloppy, bumbling. When I think about riding, this is what I love most: I have a power, a strength, a language with animals big enough to kill a person, easy. It’s the one thing that I have.

  Are you paying Uncle Whack to hang out with me? I ask.

  He needs the money, my mother says. He’s on a good track, doing the good work. One day at a time.

  What about Uncle Kai?

  He’s not ready, she says. Not responsible, not yet.

  Auntie T?

  Auntie T isn’t coming back for a while.

  Fine, I say. If we do grown-up stuff. But only if.

  My parents give Uncle Whack very clear instructions like they’ve been practicing for this moment all their lives—Parenting—to show somebody what it is they know.

  She doesn’t like to be left alone, says my mother, especially at night. She has night terrors. Chronic nosebleeds, but she knows how to handle it. She can cook soup for herself, and mostly she’ll read all day. Letters, too. You’ll have to take her to the barn to feed her horses; you’ll have to help her take her boots off—pull by the heel; you’ll have to make sure she wears a helmet. You’ll get it. And whatever you do, obviously, don’t let anyone in this house without a warrant. Lock up. The alarm code is 7-11.

  When I’m older, I’ll understand that this is around the time the FBI became interested in my father and his friends. My uncle. Jordan Belfort. Soon, our family will make headlines. But right now, I nod and say, We are very private people, yes, the way I’ve been taught. My father winks at me. He hands Uncle Whack a wad of cash, thick as a hockey puck, folded over in half. Careful with her, he says. She’s good.

  Uncle Whack is twenty-six years old, and I think he’s the oldest friend I’ll ever have. He wears blue basketball shorts with tiny pinprick-sized holes all over them, pulled down to just above his knees. Above that, plaid boxers lumpy with his white tee. His face is a perfect boyish circle, dimpled in the cheeks, and sometimes he wears a sideways baseball cap over the skunk-do. He doesn’t look like any of my men on black box channels 590–595.

  Got it, Mad Man, says Uncle Whack, giving a salute.

  Almost forgot, says my father, handing him the keys to our car.

  Careful with my Jag, he says. I know people who’d take care of you if anything happens to my Jag. Yeah? Yeah? He points to Uncle Whack and play-punches him in the chest. We all laugh along. Uncle Whack slings my father’s bags over his shoulders—Louis Vuitton printed leather, matching—and straightens his back like a butler as he walks my parents to the limousine parked on our black yawn of driveway.

  Next week, Vegas! screams my father. Get ready, baby!

  I wave from the front door.

  Did you know a rat lives inside our Jaguar? I
ask.

  Did you know is my favorite game to play with Uncle Whack. It makes me sound informed, knowledgeable.

  Nah, ma, that ain’t true. He tosses his baseball cap on our pink leather couch, then dives into it.

  Did you know that rat attacks are real? The last one happened in New York in nineteen-seventy-something. Nobody believes me about the rat in our car because it lives in the backseat, but one day it’s gonna rat attack me with a rat pack and my eyeballs will get chewed out by the time my parents get on the Sawgrass Expressway.

  Damn, ma. Why you always so twisted? Uncle Whack pulls a pack of Parliament Lights from the waistband of his boxers. He bites into a filter, lights up, blows the smoke up into our skylight. A band of wavy light streams down on his body as if he’s a saint.

  Did you know smoking will kill you? I say, But your body can and will repair itself within five years of your last cigarette?

  What are you, ten? Chill with that shit. You read that in the Cyclopedia?

  Last week, a major anti-smoking organization came to our school and taught us about the dangers of tobacco. We sang a song about cigarettes to the melody of Peter Pan’s “I Won’t Grow Up,” as a group of PTA parents and teachers filmed us on camcorders for a potential television commercial. I won’t light up! we sang, I will never smoke a day, ’cuz tobacco is EVIL, it’ll take your youth away. ’Cuz cigarettes are awfuler than all the awful things that ever were, I’ll never light up, never light up, never light up—not me!

  At the end of the day, a blonde dreidel of a woman passed around a pack of Salem Lights and told us all to sniff them and let the consequences spill over our hearts. I never wanted to let go of that pack. I wanted to absorb that woody, muscled smell. I wanted to be the blonde-permed Sandy at the end of Grease—zipped in black, tight and shining as a seal—desired and getting it once she chewed out that cigarette with a stiletto twist, as if it were a natural instinct, one she’d known all along. I pulled a Salem from the pack and ran it back and forth under my nose like a harmonica, feeling every bump of paper on my skin. I considered stealing it—pocket? Caboodle?—but the dreidel woman snapped at me to pass it on and so I did.

  Did you know I’m going to be famous? I say. A famous No Smoking advocate.

  Uncle Whack thumbs at the remote, and then another remote, and then a third. My father likes this setup: a six-foot big-screen TV, with three smaller TVs on top of it. This way, he can watch several games at the same time. Uncle Whack flicks ash into my father’s ashtray on the couch.

  So, whatcha wanna watch on Daddy Whack’s black box?

  I do not tell him the truth.

  At the barn, Uncle Whack is afraid of the horses. I show him how to palm carrots into their mouths, fingers webbed away from the teeth, but Uncle Whack keeps his distance. He adjusts his hat, turns it forward and back, saying, Nah, ma, I don’t do big dogs.

  What’s your guy’s name? he asks.

  I have four of them, I say. But this one’s my favorite. I kiss my pony on the nose. Nicky is his home name, but his show name is Cloud 9. I’m convinced the temperature of Nicky’s nose can predict the weather. Today, I feel rain.

  What’s a show name?

  Your home name is, like, stupid. It’s who you are at home. Alfie or Frisky or Wrinkles—usually kind of embarrassing. Your show name is the one you use in horse shows, and big stadiums, when you’re all braided up and exactly who you want to be. They’re jazzier. Better. My horses are Cloud 9, Velvet Slippers, and Bid’s Glitter Man, see? Tulip is my mini-pony, and she doesn’t have a show name because she’ll never grow up or be famous.

  Uncle Whack rolls his eyes. I can tell he’s not taking me seriously.

  Wanna help me tack up? I ask.

  Can I sit while I do it?

  I guess.

  I clasp Nicky into the crossties in the aisle of the barn. I ask Uncle Whack to hand over my bounce pad, my saddle. He flinches when I tighten the girth around Nicky’s barrel-belly, saying, Damn, yo, that’s rough. He loops the leather martingale around his own neck and smiles, Giddyup, it’s Uncle Whack! I don’t think he’s ever been around horses before.

  I remove Nicky’s halter and wrap my arm around his head before I say, Watch this, plunging my fingers into his gums, behind his molars, his mouth grinding grassy foam onto my shirt as I lift a snaffle bit over his tongue. There is nothing exciting or impressive about putting a bridle on a horse, but I want to show Uncle Whack that I’m not afraid of teeth, that I can be firm and deliberate.

  Did you know I brought Nicky to school for show-and-tell?

  I think I heard about that, says Uncle Whack.

  I took him on a course around the playground and we jumped the seesaw, back and forth. It was groovy. The school news did a whole segment on me.

  Is that what fancy school’s like these days? In the Rat’s Mouth? Kids bringing their ponies to school and shit?

  I’m going to Nationals this summer, you know, I say. In Chicago. Then the Olympics, obviously. I’m kind of a big deal. I’m going to be the next Margie Goldstein Engle. Even she says I’ve got something special.

  That’s ’cause you’re a kid, says Uncle Whack. Everyone talks up kids like they’re special.

  I reach my left toe into my stirrup iron and swing myself up and over Nicky’s body. No leg up, no mounting block. I want my fake uncle to know I am strong. In the ring, I warm up quickly: two-point, trot, canter. We move in tight circles. I jump courses without counting my strides. I want speed, not precision. When we fly, I yank on Nicky’s mane, dive forward, ducking; I forget about form.

  Uncle Whack is sitting on a lawn chair near the front of the barn. His legs are propped up on a tack box. He’s not even looking at me. He’s looking into his lap, checking his beeper.

  I dig my spurs into the sides of Nicky’s body. Go, boy. We build until the two of us are tight and furious as a storm wall. He froths at the mouth and neck; he can read me. We jump and jump and jump and jump until the insides of my legs burn with that feeling I can never seem to put away.

  Her name is Lacey, and she’s the kind of girl worth taking home to mom. She’s got small feet and she’s not afraid of anything; she’s like a gypsy the way she moves around from couch to couch. A peach on her that you wouldn’t believe—Lacey. No last name.

  This is what Uncle Whack tells me anyway, or maybe some of it is what I’ve gathered about Lacey from the words I clip out and keep from their conversations, things I may have even imagined from their code-talking. I keep the words in a list in my journal below the title, TOTAL FACTS KNOWN ABOUT LACEY, NO LAST NAME.

  The thing is, Uncle Whack says, Lacey lives in Tampa.

  The thing is, he says, I need to see her.

  From the way Uncle Whack speaks to Lacey on our landline, I think she must have broken his heart. I’ve overheard my mom use this voice before, at night, with my father—that desperate, animal breathing between unrelated phrases—Please, Would you?, Stay. On the other end, I hear Lacey’s sighs rattle the receiver in a wet-sounding static. She speaks slowly, Oh, Wendall, Don’t, and that’s about all I hear from her. Uncle Whack counts facts on his fingers, recalling small things they have in common—the show with the lady with the vase on her head; the man at the fair! The way he popped his son?—phrases I can only assume are inside jokes they once shared, years ago.

  Lil Kiwi, he says, hanging up the phone. You mind if I call you that?

  I guess I don’t mind, I say.

  He lights a smoke and scoots his feet up on the couch. His knees tuck in as if he were a little kid, wanting something.

  It’s just that I never know what to call you. T Kira, T, TT, Takara. T Kira is kind of a hood-ass name for a prep school Chink, you know that? Uncle Whack pulls this name, Lil Kiwi, from an armband my friend Jenny made me. She cut a ribbed sock straight across in two neat slices to make a stretchy band of fray. She colored it highlighter green, bedazzled a few stones, and scrawled LIL KIWI in the jagged graffiti letters she’s been practi
cing.

  This is your rap name, she’d said. I’m Bana, short for banana, and you’re Lil Kiwi. Together we can be some dope-ass rapping fruit. No more of that Jewey Jennifer shit.

  Uncle Whack pulls on his smoke and offers me a fist pump.

  I need you to be cool about something, he says. You’re cool though. Aren’t you?

  Uncle Whack offers me three promises if I say yes to Tampa. We can go to Busch Gardens and ride as many roller coasters as I want; he’ll buy me the best, fanciest dinner in the world—a real date, me and you, he says; Lacey will take me shopping, and style my hair, and trim my nails, whatever girls do with girls.

  I don’t want to do girl things with Lacey. I don’t want to see Lacey’s face, or get to know the inner workings of Lacey, or hear Lacey speak to Uncle Whack in her breathy, papery voice, Oh, Wendall, gripping his hand, or kissing his eyelids, or cupping a flame to his cigarette, You know you shouldn’t smoke, darling! It’s bad for you!

  But then there’s this thought, the thought that makes the roof of my mouth tingle, that makes me feel different around Uncle Whack than the way I feel around my dad, or Uncle Kai. What it is—so simple: He will learn to love me. He will learn to love me before he gets to her. Let’s go, I say. I’m cool.

  We drive northwest to Tampa in my parents’ Jaguar, with the top up.

  The rats will get us more easily this way, I say. They’re scared of the wind.

  I don’t play like that, says Uncle Whack. The wind? My hair? No bueno. He slicks back the skunk stripe with more hair gel. He looks extra polished—jeans instead of the basketball shorts, a shave that makes his chin look like a new sponge. He looks so nice it makes the hairs on the back of my neck go wired, and it also repulses me.

  When is Lacey going to meet us? I ask.

  I don’t know yet, ma, he says. Gotta wait for the beep. He taps his beeper a few times, hooked on his belt loop, to remind me that it’s there. He lights a cigarette with the red snail coil of the car lighter.