Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

by T Kira Madden

  My mother stares into the pantry, shaking her head. She sips slow and gently from her glass, careful not to spill. There are noises now—words coming out: Money, investment, snapped, pushed, and then, the soup cans, the money. I ask her to slow down. She says my father has been binging on his special stuff and hasn’t slept in over three days. The Other Place, she says. The fight started in the kitchen, simple at first, before he took her by the wrists and didn’t know what to do with all his love. She says things like this all the time lately, words like love to describe our suffering. She doesn’t know if I’m old enough to hold the truth in my hands, to measure that.

  I know, I say, you don’t have to explain more.

  I wish you didn’t have to know so much, she says.

  I know.

  I hug my mother at the kitchen sink and let her cry into my shoulder. She leaves black and red marks on my white, crisp uniform. I am only five foot two, but we’re the same height by now. From a slight distance, people mistake us for sisters.

  I tell my mother I’ll heat up two cans of Campbell’s for dinner. I pluck them from the top of the pile. Wipe the blood with a paper towel. I crank the can opener till the aluminum exhales. I smash the pots and pans around, bang them into one another like gongs. The stove coils throb red. The stars boil. I open and close the dishwasher in a crashing swing, like I’m bowling. I want my father to wake up so badly, to tell me his side of the story, to bury his head in his hands, apologizing, changed. He doesn’t move.

  What are we going to do? my mother says, in the bathtub. It’s one in the morning, and my father is still asleep. The water’s gone cold, and I turn the hot lever every few minutes. What do we do now?

  I wash my mother’s body with a sea sponge. I can see every vertebra of her spine like this, curled over, her head down. She holds her shins close to her chest as if to give the water more room. There are no more wounds to clean, nothing I missed, but I can tell the sponge is comforting to her. It’s a quiet touch.

  Please don’t cry anymore, I say. We don’t have to do anything.

  Has he ever hurt you? she wants to know.

  He hasn’t. He has never touched either one of us before today. Not like this, exactly.

  Once, when I was younger, he was in such a spell that he came after me and my mother with a wooden baseball bat. He said he would kill us. He thought that we were somebody else, some other person or people who had hurt him. I think he’d hoped we were.

  The two of us ran into my parents’ bedroom and locked the door. My mother screamed, rocking me to her chest. He beat the door with the bat until it splintered, and fell asleep on the tile floor outside the bedroom, the handle still in his hand. He woke up and yelled, Who broke this bat? I paid for this!

  That night, I asked my mother why he even owned a bat—he doesn’t play baseball.

  He bought it to protect us, she said.

  The next day, when I asked my father, he denied the incident.

  I didn’t break the bat, he said. You did.

  When my mother gets out of the bath, I wrap a towel around her from behind. I dip cotton swabs into the mouths of ointment bottles and make her wounds look glossy. I pull a T-shirt over her head, lift rose-patterned pants up and over her skin. Her face is still, staring. I help her into bed, right foot, then the left, walk to the freezer, drop fistfuls of ice into a grocery bag. I spin the bag, knot it, pass my father’s body on the way back to her room.

  I press the cool to her cheeks, her eyes.

  I say, It’s okay, MomMom.

  My mother holds my hands against the ice against her face. She says, You want to get out of here?

  My mother packs her bag, and I go into my room, pack my own. I don’t have much to take: my diary, a Wiccan spell book, Drew Barrymore’s memoir Little Girl Lost, my stuffed tiger, Tia, my riding boots and spurs. I spill out a drawer full of underwear, silk pajamas. I snatch my strawberry-flavored gas mask from my nightstand—the mask used for anesthesia when I got surgery for my nosebleeds—a mask that still makes me feel sleepy, relaxed, cared for, when I press it into my face hard enough and breathe. I drop all my things into a black garbage bag. I have always wanted this rush, the swing of my arms around objects that I will pack to remind myself of the way things used to be. This was my life, back then. More than anything, though, I have always ached for the runaway’s return home, like in the movies—parents with their outstretched hands, heavy blankets with which to wrap you, the home-cooked meal with plates warmed in the oven, the tired, grateful faces. I have always wanted the reunion.

  My mother carries our bags to the car. She doesn’t even look into the living room as she passes. I walk to the couch, scoot my father’s body over. The back of his neck is hot to the touch. I run my fingers through his sandy hair. I say, You made a really big mess this time, Daddy. My mother honks Big Beau three times. I kiss my father on the back of his skull, set the alarm, and run.

  My mother says little in the car. She looks strong, her jaw clenched, her chin up. She gets like this when things are at their worst: upturned, dignified. She hands me a map and a new highlighter from the dash, says, Find the best route out of here. She is strong in ways I won’t comprehend until I am much older.

  An hour later, she calls up my half brothers, those other two boys, leaves a message: You’re on your own for the intervention. I’m gone. I have never heard this word—intervention—and I ask her what she means. It’s something that could save your father, she says, something they were planning for this week. My brothers were going to fly all the way to Boca Raton for this. They wrote parting speeches about missed T-ball games, flute recitals. They have what she calls Bottom Lines to offer. She repeats herself, over and over, like she’s trying to believe it herself—This will save his life, it will save him, it will, and this explanation shocks me because I never knew he was dying.

  We make one stop on our drive to Seven Devils, North Carolina, where we will hide out on a mountain for one month. Somewhere around Jacksonville, my mother feels too tired to go on, but I am awake. She pulls into a motel. She tells me to hush. She finds a metal gate to the swimming pool, lifts the peg from its hole. My mother says, Go ahead, jump in. You have more clothes in the car. Tire yourself out, she says.

  Even though I don’t know how to swim, I have always loved the water. I like it here in the shallow end with my T-shirt bubbling up in a tie-dye dome. In the water, I can be a dancer, a gymnast, an astronaut, anybody else. I can do things like balance on my toes. I swish around and flick the surface until my mother falls asleep on a lawn chair. She looks like she’s sunbathing even though it’s still dark out. Ripples of aqua light flick across her bare legs, her bruises.

  I wonder if my father has woken up. If he has checked the bedrooms, the car.

  I kick my legs as hard as I can in the water. Take a breath. There is nothing I love more than to sink to the bottom of a pool. See how long my body can keep itself from rising.

  REWIRED

  In rehab, my father has a heart attack playing water polo with dope addicts. His body was in too much shock coming down from all that. His heart too excited; rewired. So the doctors say.

  My father calls us from rehab, after this incident. His addiction therapist is on the line to listen in on our call. My father asks about our day, my horses, what am I going to do for school? His words are clear and precise. No sleepy drag. He asks me questions and waits patiently for answers, and this makes him sound like somebody else’s father.

  Are you somebody else’s father? I say. Because I don’t look like you, and I’m not cruel like you, and we have such different voices and hands, and I don’t even feel that Jewish, and no father of mine has a heart attack in a goddamn swimming pool, and I am really starting to question.

  But what are you doing about school? he says. How will you do well in school from North Carolina? Some things are important, according to my father.

  My teachers send homework in the mail. Yellow paper packets. Fat clips. P
eriodic tables. I tell each and every one of them somebody died.

  Somebody died, I say on the phone, because my mother is too superstitious to say it.

  My teachers have always called me a liar. You play sick, they’ve said. Nobody skips like you. Nobody is sick so much. Sick in your head, maybe. What do you do all day at home?

  Absent again, Queera? Clarissa will ask me on AOL. Cheater.

  What I do all day when I’m at home: I watch Bob Ross flutter his paint strokes on the television in my room. I listen to him describe the world—the cockeyed birds, the fuzzed-over face of a rock. I want to shape my own planet this way, color it the way I want. I boil soup; I practice making coins disappear between my fingers; I call psychic hotlines; I wait for my parents to wake up.

  Somebody died out here, I tell my teachers, so we’re burying them all up.

  Them?

  Nobody ever believes me.

  Plural?

  What I do all day here in North Carolina: More soup. More magic tricks. I practice levitating playing cards, spinning them between my outstretched hands. I breathe into my gas mask and pretend that I’m dying. I ask my mother to drive us past the local orphanage so I can be dropped off and live like Little Orphan Annie. This always hurts her feelings. Do you know what I’ve gone through to keep you? she says. My mother is drying out here, too, but she doesn’t have help like my father. Mostly, she sleeps. We listen to Tammy Wynette and watch a movie about Tina Turner having her face smashed in by Ike Turner. There is so much we’re both trying to understand.

  You’re exactly like me, my father says into the phone. Carbon copy.

  I am not.

  My mother stands in the corner of the living room. She stands stiff and blank-faced as if in a crowded elevator. She’s always in this elevator lately—arms by her side, waiting—and I wonder where she goes in her mind. Which floor. Which new view.

  She looks at me on the phone, the curls of the cord warping my fingers bloodless. She says, You have his canker sores. His bad hip. His receding hairline. You are both sharp when it comes to giving directions, but neither one of you can stand being left alone.

  My father says, You’re wrong, you have my hands.

  THE FEELS OF LOVE

  A senior thinks you’re cute, Beth Diaz whispers in your ear. These are the most amazing words you’ve ever heard come out of her mouth. There is you, and then there are high school seniors—seventeen-, eighteen-year-olds, with cars and sound systems, no uniforms on Fridays because they’re now exempt. You ask, Who? Who?, your abdomen burning up with this news, and she whispers again, Shhhh, it’s Chad—that’s who, because her friend’s brother’s cousin’s babysitter said so. Something like that, but it doesn’t matter to you. A senior thinks you’re cute.

  And who are you? You are still a middle schooler, twelve years old, almost thirteen. You have two friends, four horses, a new splatter of acne across your forehead; you don’t even wear a bra yet. Lately, you are known as Queera or Twinky Chinky. But now, everything is different—everything will change, you’re sure—a senior thinks you’re cute.

  Here’s what you do when you come home from school: Find Chad in last year’s yearbook. Call Clarissa and Beth on three-way to tell them you found him: Look, page forty-nine. Those lips! they both say, and you agree. You have never seen anyone more beautiful than Chad. His eyes are squinty and green, like the deep end of a lake, his black hair spiked. The yearbook shows him laughing with a group of friends, sprawled out on a school picnic table in the sun. They look so much like adults you can’t even believe it.

  He’s going to instant message you tonight, says Beth. I gave my friend’s brother’s cousin’s babysitter your screen name to give to him. You all scream into the phone. You scream a scream that brings your father into the room, soggy from a nap, yelling. The fuck is happening? You jacking up my phone bill? He closes the door before you can answer.

  Here’s the thing about America Online, about the instant messaging: you can be anyone—Dominique Moceanu, Britney Spears’s cousin, a milkmaid from Mississippi, a criminal—anyone but yourself. Recently, the jealous ex-boyfriend of a popular girl from school—such a creeper—uploaded some photos of her onto an AOL homepage. They show the girl lying on her stomach, on a bed, her pink thong blooming. Slats of light curve over her body from the bent window blinds. She wears dark-blue eye shadow; her hair is in a white-blonde ponytail; her pointer finger is in her mouth. You and Clarissa have been sending these photos to the anonymous men you meet online, in chatrooms, and they’re all crazy about this so-called Ashley Flowers, a tenth grader in downtown Miami. They send erotic poems, photos of the stirring bulges in their pants, hyphen roses that blossom into @ symbols. One man named Richard sends a blurry photo of his cock next to a Coke can, for scale. In the dark, with your face inches from the screen, you feel like each one of these men might love you.

  On the news, JonBenét Ramsey does a dance. Her case is still open, years later, and everyone still cares. You watch her stamped-on face, clickety-clack cowboy boots, the tulle, her curls of shredded heaven. You strap on your headgear, hook the elastic behind your big ears. One has to be so beautiful to be chosen like that, you think. Only beautiful girls are taken. Angelic, white girls. Adored and obsessed over. Too good for this Earth. Your parents sip their seltzers, hold hands, and say, Such a damn shame. So cute, she was.

  It is important to this story to know that Beth is beautiful. Beth is Latina, whip-smart, a salsa dancer, the first poet you’ve ever met. But most important, she is beautiful. She is almost one full year older, the oldest of the seventh graders, while you are the youngest. She has always been kind to you and Clarissa, and you’re both as jealous as you are grateful. Beth has friends, admiring teachers, and parents. Most of all, she has boys. You and Clarissa watch it happen in the hallways at school—a boy’s arms wrapped around her, his little metal mouth going in for a kiss. I put lotion on as soon as I get out of the shower, Beth says. In every place. The best way in is smelling good. The next day, you and Clarissa go to the mall and buy the same Juniper Breeze lotion as Beth. You smudge it on your wrists, rub it through your hair to grease down the flyaways; you slick it between your legs even though it stings there. One weekend, Beth offers to do your makeup like her own. You and Clarissa sit still as figurines while Beth paints on the glitter powders, the goopy gloss. She traces black lines around your eyes and inside the rims of your eyelids. You can tell she cares, that she wants you to feel more sophisticated, older. When she is this close to your face, you almost kiss her.

  Chad does instant message you. Every night, in fact, like clockwork.

  Hey Cherry Top, he says, because seventh grade is the grade you dyed your hair Mars red, to offset the braces.

  Hey you is what you always say. You sounds adult, closer than friends.

  I think ur so cute, he says. The first thing I noticed about you was ur red hair. Very punk! I luv it.

  Cute? ROFLMAO. Look who’s talking lol, you say.

  You gnaw at your cuticles and wait for him to respond, for the bloop sound of his messages.

  You have abandoned all your other chat-room boyfriends. Ashley Flowers is DEAD, you tell the men. This is her mother speaking and she is gone! My sadness is uncontrollable! I can’t bear it!

  She was murdered, she had leukemia but didn’t want to tell you, she slipped on a ski slope in Lake Tahoe—such a tragic vacation! It changes every day. You and Clarissa receive wonderful e-mails from Ashley’s suitors—how much she meant to them, how she was the bright light of their days, how they’ve written ballads in her honor, how they would each marry her, they would. Clarissa takes on the role of Ashley’s grieving best friend so she can continue chatting with those who show the most sensitivity.

  But you don’t need any of them anymore. All you need is Chad, a person in the real world, a real man who drives a real car. Chad, who knows what you look like, who noticed you, who even knows your school schedule and where you take your study hall.
You and Chad chat all night about your favorite movies and Bill Clinton and the science teacher you’ve both had. I think she might be an actual LESBO, you say, and he agrees, SUCH a dyke LOL.

  I think U might be the only person to understand me, you say.

  Same here! says Chad.

  Why aren’t we real friends @ school then? U dun even say hi.

  People would judge lol. They wouldn’t understand us.

  I guess.

  Baby just consider us special friends, he says. Our own little secret.

  Baby. You repeat the word aloud to yourself, read and reread it on your screen to be sure. Your heart thumps between your legs. Baby.

  Secrets can b the most fun, he says.

  Fifteen years later, you are twenty-seven years old, and your father has just died. You’re in an isolated artist colony in New Hampshire in the frozen snap of winter, here to finish another project you have failed to finish, and you sob yourself to sleep every night thinking about how much you miss your father—his big sweeping arms, your smallness. You go so long without talking to other people that you begin having conversations with a rocking chair, convinced the chair is haunted by your father. He rocks it sometimes, on his own, and you try to decipher the code. While browsing through old e-mails one night, you find a message in your spam box.

  It’s Chad.

  It’s dated one year ago, almost to the day.

  It says, I need you to forgive me for the things that have happened. It is my one wish.

  You recognize this message. You have received similar messages from him over the years—delete, block, vomit, repeat. Each time you block one, Chad creates a new account and name, sends another.

  You have never once considered responding to his pleas. The few people you have ever told have said, Don’t. Don’t you dare. Forget you ever saw that. It is satisfying to delete his words, to watch them disappear, but here’s the thing: you can’t forget you ever saw that.