Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

by T Kira Madden

  And then: I wish I were a boy.

  And then: I look like every other girl there ever was.

  You do your best with the sample powders, rub the beige cream under your eyes. Your mom will notice the mess of you, you’re sure. You are nothing like your mother. Since drying out, your mother is clean and smooth as a candlewick. Pressed creases. Adored.

  You buy each of your parents a present with their own money. A teacup for your mother. A baseball cap for your father. You buy a large bottle of orange soda from the food court—your favorite. You want the fizzy orange chemicals to dye your mouth, to blame the bloom of your lips on this simple thing.

  Your parents pick you up from the entrance of Burdines at four o’clock. Those lips! they say, and you agree. You lift the empty bottle of soda, Sorry, I must’ve drunk too much.

  You look like you’re bleeding, says your father.

  I tripped on the escalator, you say.

  You sure about that? asks your father.

  I’m super sure.

  Something happen in there with Beth? he says.

  Your father was never a great father, but, when sober, he was always a great man. He was the person who loved you most, and, fifteen years later when he dies, when you’re talking to that rocking chair in New Hampshire hoping it is he who has possessed it, you consider this moment in the car—how the trajectory of your life and your relationship to him could have changed had you told him the truth. If there was no mother in the driver’s seat, no fear of getting in trouble; if there was no escalator in that mall. It’s a father’s job to protect his daughter, he told you, more than once, but your story never got there. That story is not yours.

  Just shut up about it, you say.

  The only person you ever tell is Clarissa, sitting on her bed under her painted-on clouds. You tell the story calmly, sucking on your fingertips, no big deal. You tell her they both wanted you, they both had to have you, and you were very good at it. Their cocks were big, and you took the whole thing like a goddamn champ.

  You are such a slut! she screams.

  Jealous, you think. You want so badly for her to be jealous.

  You gonna do it again? she asks.

  Nah, you say. They’re graduating soon. I don’t want them to get too attached to me.

  The truth: you never heard from Gil again. You heard from Chad only once, online. He asked if you might be willing to meet up with him the following weekend at the mall again, if next time you would let him fuck you in the backseat. He promises it will feel good, after it hurts. He warns you not to tell Beth. You block his screen name, unhook your private line. You begin sleeping in your parents’ bed every night, a habit you were never able to fully break.

  It was just so romantic, you say. You believe these words. That’s how it works.

  Gil’s e-mail address is listed on his law firm’s website.

  It’s late at night in the New Hampshire library, your bracelets clattering against the desk. Another colonist named James watches your hands shake, says, Are you sure you want to do that? Are you sure you want to open up all of that?

  You are.

  Do you remember me? you type. I have some questions. I would be grateful if you might be willing to answer them.

  Why did you hurt me? is the only question, the only one that matters, but you do not write this.

  Of course I remember you! he replies, almost immediately. I will give it my best to answer any questions you have. I hope you are doing good!

  You ask if he might be willing to share his memory of that day at the mall. Your point of view would be helpful for my own closure, you say, no matter what that may be. You ask if he has ever thought of it again, if the experience ever held any weight for him. You tell him there are no right answers. You believe this is true.

  Gil responds from a different e-mail address. His personal one.

  Let me really think about it, he says, so I can give you my best recollection.

  I want to help you, he says, in any way that I can.

  You never hear from Gil again.

  On Skype, the twenty-eight-year-old Beth looks exactly the same. There is a reason I am so difficult to find, she says, but I’m so glad you found me.

  She is still so beautiful, Beth. You cry as soon as you see her face on the screen.

  I’m doing well, she says.

  I love living somewhere with seasons, she says.

  I heard about your dad, she says. No one could ever forget him.

  Thank you.

  Beth tells you that she still works every day to forget her experiences with Chad. She says she doesn’t blame him, that blaming him would give him power. Beth believes that blame would add fuel to a dangerous situation, and anyways, it’s a chapter she’s closed. She is religious these days, at peace with her thirteen-year-old self and the decisions she knows she was not prepared to make. She says, If I can wish him well, I feel that I have won.

  Do you feel that he assaulted you? you ask.

  No, she says. I think he only ever wanted love.

  You talk for an hour, maybe two, but these are the only details you can share here, right now. Remember, there is a reason she’s so difficult to find. By now, you both are.

  One day, in the spring, Beth hands you a diamond-shaped note, not looking at you: Meet me at the flagpole after class.

  At the bell, she swings on her backpack and almost hits you in the face with it.

  Outside, in the sun, Beth’s hair whips around her face like she’s pulsing with electricity. Her eyes twitch so the tears won’t fall. You know what is about to happen, and you miss her already.

  Was it worth it? she asks.

  Was what?

  You cover your ears with your hands. You say, No, No, No, No. You cry. You take it. You deserve every last insult. You beg. You fall on your knees and stain your uniform in the wet grass. Your classmates walk by, shaking their heads. You almost throw up into the dirt. You say, Please, Beth. No, please.

  Beth picks you up off the ground by your armpits. She hugs you like she means it, like she’s the first person who has ever wanted to take care of you. You do not understand why, not yet, but no one has ever been more kind to you than Beth.

  Beth tries to be your friend for the rest of high school, but it’s not the same. You are a slut and you know it. You can’t be trusted and you know it. Soon, you only occasionally wave to each other from across the halls.

  No one ever speaks of Chad again, not once he graduates. Clarissa told Beth what you had done—It was the right thing to do—and, entering high school, the two of them become best friends.

  You deface both of their pictures in your yearbook.

  You sleep with the book in your arms.

  You tell Chad, Clarissa, and Beth that you’re writing an essay about them. They all give you permission, tell you to rename them however you’d like.

  I am so deeply honored that you would write about me, Chad says. Although I’m sure your portrayal of me will not be glorious. He has had a spiritual awakening, and he sends you a YouTube video about it. He asks if you are religious. He feels bad for you that you’re not. He compares you to a plant growing in the shade. He wants to know if you’re single.

  You are not sure why you are even talking to Chad, what you think he can tell you.

  Was there anyone else? you ask him. Other girls our age—besides me and Beth?

  One name, and then another. And another. He lists four right then, though there will be more later (That car, one will say. I can still feel the air-conditioning inside of that car). These are girls you knew, liked. A girl from the school play. A girl who once made you a friendship bracelet out of telephone wire. Other girls everyone wanted to be.

  Chad says, My life up to this point has been … not so much fun. You could say I was paid back one hundred times over for what I did to you or anyone else. Does that make you feel better?

  Does it? I still don’t know.

  All of us in the same car, out
side the same mall. All of us girls, now women. All of our hands reaching for a door.

  PART II

  THE GREETER

  COUSIN CINDY

  There goes Cousin Cindy again. She looks like Betty Boop, with the same red lips and hair. She’s a tween but looks older—strapped up in all the right places—beloved. Men pay attention.

  Here, in the Disney park, grown men in animal suits take their heads off to whisper animal things into Cousin Cindy’s ear. They want to take care of her, bite the skin behind her knees. They want to make like Aladdin and show her the world. They call her princess and duchess, and she leans in to hear them better, a Firecracker popsicle rounded out in her mouth—What’s that, Mister Nice?—her sweating, budding chest against their fur. She pulls her shorts up by the belt loops, lets the perfect moon-curve of her ass hang below the frayed denim and bounce there.

  My Grandma Sitchie always says Cousin Cindy got the looks and I got the brains, the sweetness. I’m the sensitive one, she always says. A yolk to my heart. If I could combine the two of you, I’d have the perfect granddaughter. Grandma Sitchie is my father’s mother. She’s Jewish; she gets her hair set at the salon twice a week; she hates my mother; she’s the reason we’re in Boca Raton.

  She’s a bitch, that Cindy, dumb as a gnat, but prettier than Hepburn, Grandma explains one day while eating a Bundt-mold of savory Jell-O. She points the wet spoon at me for emphasis. Lucille Ball’s laugh crackles through the kitchen.

  I want to be Cousin Cindy when I grow up. I tell my Grandma Sitchie I’d trade in all my brains and sweetness to be a little more like her.

  It’s true, she says, nodding, that life gets on much easier, much better, if you’re pretty.

  Cousin Cindy, babysitting me in North Carolina. It’s the summer I turn eight. Yesterday the whole family went white-water rafting down the Watauga River. We played Red-Neck-Bingo with homemade score cards—checking off satellite dishes, yard art, tires and couches on roofs—as we shot past the country homes.

  Our rafting guide’s name was Alphonso, and he joked that he could sink our very raft with the weight of himself, depending on which way he leaned. He kept biscuits under his armpits and between the rolls of his skin to keep them warm and dry. Cousin Cindy loved this, sat on his lap, ate the biscuits from his big, meaty hands, laughing. When Alphonso threw my sandal into the river, Cousin Cindy snatched it up between her acrylic nails, slapped him across the face with it, said, Don’t mess with my baby, you bad boy, you.

  Now she is babysitting me in my family’s cabin, turning off my bedroom lights, telling me to nod off already, go to fucking bed, Jesus Christ, I take it back, I didn’t mean it or anything, but for real can you go the fuck to sleep, aren’t you tired? No? Seriously? Not even after all that rafting, the food I made you, Jesus I never want a kid, and what kind of kid eats so much even? How many boxes of Velveeta can you chow? Is that your Chinese side? Why’s your nose always bleeding, it honestly freaks me the fuck out, do I need to do something about it?

  Cousin Cindy presses her hands together like she’s praying. She says, I’m sorry, but when you’re seventeen you’ll understand. She closes my door.

  I’ve been reading Harriet the Spy and keeping my very own spy journal. I decide there is no better time to write, to report, than tonight with Cousin Cindy. I crawl to my bedroom door, lower the brass handle. I push it open and breathe into the triangle of light. Cousin Cindy is standing at the dresser mirror, next to the front door. She paints on black lipstick with a tiny brush, teases her curls with a pick. She clasps a big silver cross around her neck so Jesus hangs squeezed between her breasts. She sprays perfume from a diamond-shaped bottle into the air and walks right into it, spins three times.

  There’s a knock on the door. It’s Alphonso, in real clothes. No life vest, no biscuits. In our house, he’s just a college boy—an Appalachian State University sweatshirt, tattered camouflage pants, a beeper clamped to his pocket. Cousin Cindy kisses him long and hard, like they’ve been waiting for this moment all their lives. She walks backward and pulls him by the sweatshirt until they reach the plaid couch. She pushes him onto it, kneels down, unzips. Alphonso doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he holds them up by his face. I think, this is what Alphonso must have looked like as a child—this face widened with shock and awe—a boy who tripped over his sandcastle, who peeled open the eyes of a newborn kitten, a boy who just destroyed something for the first time.

  I write down what I see. Their limbs tangle, and the two of them fall asleep like this. I am jealous of Alphonso, seeing my cousin this way, this other view of her body. I want to be closer. I want this image of a woman all for myself.

  My parents walk in soon after. What the / from the raft? / our daughter, where? / the biscuit boy?

  I never see Alphonso again.

  Cousin Cindy, taking me to my second concert in the world. I’m eleven. It’s Britney Spears, and Britney is wearing white leather pants with pink patches on her knees. We’re in the first row—my mother bought us the tickets—and Cousin Cindy is sneaking drags from her Newports, blowing the smoke beneath our seats. The bouncer wraps his hand around her neck, tells her it’s okay—I won’t tell if you won’t, sweetheart—and she gives him a wink.

  I am standing, dancing, my belly showing like Britney, but Cousin Cindy stays knees-up in her folding seat. She acts annoyed, but every once in a while I catch her mouthing the words—My loneliness is killing me—smiling. I can tell there is something inside her that is burning to be here. The lights, the glamour, Britney’s long, plastic ponytail, the bubblegum beat. I think, Cousin Cindy should have been a star. She has never talked about a life she wants, but maybe this is it. Maybe she was right to drop out of beauty school. Maybe she’s meant to be the glittering girl on this stage, uglier girls at her feet, their hands cupped around their mouths screaming Cindy! Cindy! as she pauses before the last word of everyone’s favorite song, closing her eyes, making the whole world beg for it.

  Cousin Cindy is sad on the car ride home. She chain-smokes, pops the car lighter, bites the side of her lip till the scarlet drags off. She says it’s a good thing I have her to take me to these concerts, to show me a good time. It’s a good thing she’s around to take care of me, since my parents are so fucked. Fucked how? I ask. I’ve never heard the words used in quite this way. Cracked out, she says. Coke, rocks, all that shit. Your parents are the reason I’ll never get high, swear to God, that shit ain’t for me. You’re so goddamn lucky you got your Cousin Cindy.

  Cousin Cindy, calling my first cell phone. I’m thirteen.

  Your mom can’t hear, right?

  No way.

  I’ve got a new job in Hollywood. It’s rad; the people are nice. I’m tired all the time but most of all, I miss you. Come out, she says, I miss my baby.

  Hollywood, Florida, is nothing like the Hollywood on television. There are no movie stars, no hills. Instead, there’s a trash mountain big enough to block out the sunset, where men in jumpsuits torch diapers under the buzzards. My mother says I’m not allowed to go to this Hollywood, this particular block Cousin Cindy is describing, where sex shops line the streets in mean yellows.

  I can’t come, I tell Cousin Cindy. You know I can’t. Everybody knows about your job and what it is.

  Jesus Christ, it’s not like I’m a stripper, she says. I’m a waitress at a strip club. I serve drinks, chicken wings. I don’t take my shit off.

  I know. I didn’t say—

  Tell your mother I don’t take my shit off.

  We know.

  I need my baby, she says. I’m lonely. Just come down for lunch, will you? The wings are so good here. You’d like them. Extra hot.

  A weekend with Cousin Cindy. It’s been a while since the Julia Roberts movies and the matching manicures and the Tell me, how’s it like in real school? So goddamn rich the kids have diamonds on their cell phones, no? You still have those spy laptops? Those yacht parties?

  Tonight we’re on a cr
uise ship because I am this winter season’s Grand Champion Equestrian. It’s the end-of-the-year awards banquet, and the Wellington Horse Show Association wants to hand off ribbons taller than I am, little statues and trophies with golden ponies on top. My parents haven’t left their bedroom in almost a week, so Cousin Cindy volunteered.

  Free steak? A reason for my party dress? Duh.

  She wears crimped hair teased and fastened in a circle by glittering pins. The mound of bright blonde curls is bigger than a cantaloupe. Cousin Cindy never liked the natural ash of her hair, and has been painting on boxes of dye since she was old enough to ride a bike.

  During the award ceremony, a shipmate dressed in all denim approaches Cousin Cindy at our table. He whispers in her ear, presses a folded piece of paper into her palm. When the trophies are gone, she takes me below deck to meet him. She holds my prizes in her arms.

  The denim man is waiting in a room full of humming machinery. His name, he says, is Sean Connery. Oh my God, like the movie star? Cousin Cindy asks. Any relation?

  A different spelling, he says. I’m S-H-A-W-N. I’m bigger, you see. He flexes a bicep and stares at it, points at the bulge, as if surprised. I don’t know who the real Sean Connery is, but I hate this one.

  Why don’t you girlies let Shawn Connery take you on a tour of the underbelly?

  Can I drive this ship? asks Cousin Cindy.

  If you’re good. Shawn Connery slaps her ass.

  It only takes three rooms, three explanations of the rudders, the hull, before Shawn Connery starts eying me differently, closing a metal door before I can step into the room. Don’t you have pony stuff to do? he says, giving Cousin Cindy a smile, an emphasis on that question mark in a tone they both believe to be Grown-Up Talk—a language all children, anywhere, understand. I step outside the room and wait a few minutes. I wait until I hear Cousin Cindy whispering Shawn Connery’s name before I get it, feel relieved, before I ask if they can at least hand over my trophies.