Addie on the Inside (5 page)

Bobby licks hot fudge from his lower
lip, says you have to work on a
relationship, makes me think he's
been watching too much TV.

Joe reaches for my hand across
the table, says, “It's not like you two
are what you'd call stable. You've
broken up, like, what? Six times?”

“Only five,” I mutter, thinking about
our latest fight and how I have no
appetite. I tap the table with my spoon.
My ice cream melts. I don't care.

I'm waiting for Grandma to finish scrubbing the lasagna pan,
my towel at the ready, when one of the cats—Kennedy, I suspect—
hisses loudly in the living room. This is followed by an even
louder hiss, a howl that threatens to become an aria, and
a four-letter word from my dad that he saves for occasions
like this. Grandma laughs and hands me the pan. “Sounds
like your grandpa and me in the early years.” “You fought?”
“Oh, honey, he could hiss and I could spit to put those cats
in there to shame. But over time we changed, mellowed
as most people do. Do you and your young man fight?”
“To put those cats in there to shame,” I answer. Grandma
laughs again. “Well, I'm not saying it's right, but I'm guessing
it's only wrong if you bring out the claws. That is something
your grandpa and I never did.” Later, when the cats are curled
into each other on their pillow and Johnson is licking the top
of Kennedy's head, I see Grandma look up from her book
and nod. “That's right,” she murmurs. “That's right.”

KABUL, Afghanistan – Forced marriages involving girls have been part of the social compacts between tribes and families for centuries. Beating, torture, and trafficking of women remain common and are broadly accepted.

—
The New York Times

Grandma and I sit reading the
New York Times
,
dusting the pages with powdered sugar from the
jelly doughnuts we have smuggled into the House of
Healthful Eating. We exchange conspiratorial
winks as Grandma says, “What they don't know
won't hurt them.”

My mother is out. My father is, in his words,
puttering. I lick powder from my fingers, turn
a page, reach for my mug of coffee, extra light
with lots of sugar. And then I see the photo
of Nadia with her staring eyes and her bandaged
nose. I tell myself not to read the story, but
of course I do.

In Afghanistan there is a girl named Nadia—
only seventeen, not that much older than me—
who had her nose and an ear cut off while she slept.
Her husband was settling a dispute.

Girls as young as six are forced into marriages,
sold for a few hundred dollars to pay off the debts
of their drug-addicted fathers. And their mothers
have no power to change how it goes. They too
have been beaten and raped, sold and traded like
disposable goods, owned by men, while the only thing
they own is their misery, which some trade for
a bottle of rat poison.

The girls at my school talk about makeup and manicures,
clear skin and straight hair, diets and the perfect
nose. Nadia has had six operations and needs more,
just to have a nose through which she can breathe.

And what do I talk about if not clear skin and straight hair?
I talk about Nadia and about Mariam, married at eleven
to a man thirty years older than she, and beaten
for being unable to bear him a child.

I talk about the poems of Naomi Shihab Nye.
I talk about
Sold
by Patricia McCormick.
I talk about suffering and how I don't know
anything about it.

I think I suffer when other girls say cruel things
about me behind my back. I think I suffer when a boy
I like tells me goodbye. I think I suffer when my father
gives me one of his silent looks. But my father
would not sell me for any amount of money. At night
I sleep in a warm bed. In the morning
I sit in a warm kitchen reading the paper,
eating powdered doughnuts.

Nadia says, “I don't know anything about happiness.”

I go find my father, give him a hug. “What's up?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Can't a girl just give her father a hug?”
He kisses the top of my head, says, “You smell like sugar,”
and doesn't move until I let him.

Does it count as breaking up if the words are never said?
On Monday DuShawn sidles up to me at my locker, goes,
“What's up, girl?” His fingers working a rubber band, his
jaws chewing gum that smells of clove, the word
girl
full
of honey.

Maybe we half broke up. Maybe when you half break up,
you don't have to say anything. There are so many things
I could say, but I like the smell of clove, and there's his
hand reaching out for mine. “Not much,” I say, taking it,
“what's up with you?”

I
Love

At lunch DuShawn says to me,
“You always punctuate my epiphanies
with pain.”

“Say what?” says

half the table. But I laugh, I get it,
it's our little joke, a line from
one of our two favorite comic strips—
not
Get Fuzzy
, the other one,
about the cow and the boy.

DuShawn gives me his crooked smile,
his face breaking out in dimples,
and I know it's a look that's meant
for only me, and I feel my insides
flip and my brain flop, and I know
I should know better, but so what,
so what.

I heart love.

Another Saturday night and it goes like this:
Bobby's dad calling out, “Anybody home?”
My mom calling back, “Door's open, Mike!”
Bobby poking me, saying hey. We escape
to my room while Mike makes one of his
famous stir-fries and my mom puts her tofu
key lime pie in the fridge to chill.

“Chill,” Mike says to my dad, who's asking
what he can do to help. Halfway up the stairs
Bobby and I roll our eyes. Parents
can be
so
embarrassing. Grandma puts out
some cheeses and tells the cats to scat.

Later we all look at old photos Mike found
while cleaning out a drawer. There we are,
Bobby and me, our squishy little faces
almost as red as they are now as we're forced
to look at ourselves as babies. “Always thought
we'd have more,” Mike says, and my mother
leaves it unspoken that she and my dad had
always planned to have only one.

The grown-ups get to talking, remembering
this time, remembering that. Slowly the house
fills with love, like a balloon with helium, only
it feels like it's us being filled up, growing light-
headed and silly.

“Life is full of surprises,” Mike says, a catch
in his throat. Grandma nods as the palm of her
hand floats down Kennedy's back. “Indeed
it is,” she says. They are looking at a wedding
picture of Bobby's parents. Mike asks if he
could have another cup of tea.

Bobby and I have known each other our whole
lives. He's my oldest friend. One day, if we're
lucky, we will be old friends, sitting around
with our kids after supper, looking at photos,
remembering ourselves now, saying life
is full of surprises.

Bobby's mom was an actress.
I saw her on television once.
Twice, if you count the commercial
for Anthony's Albany Auto.
The main time was when she had a part
on a show I was too young to watch
but my parents let me stay up to see
“just this once” because it was special.
She played a patient in a hospital, dying
of some Hollywood disease.
She looked pale. Her voice sounded soft
and far away. I remember the way she cried
and said, “How can I leave the children?”
I was impressed that she could cry like that.

That night I had a bad dream and crawled into bed
between my mother and my father.
In the morning I wished I hadn't watched,
even if it was exciting knowing that Bobby's mom
was someone almost famous.

A year later she was a real patient
in a real hospital where no one knew
she had once been on TV dying a Hollywood death.
She joked and said, “Too bad I didn't have cancer
before I got that part. I would have been
so much more believable.”

Bobby and his dad live in a trailer in Shadow Glen.
A framed photo of his mom hangs on a wall.
The photo is glamorous in a way his mother never was,
but Bobby likes it, and so does his dad,
and so do I because I think it's how
she dreamed herself to sleep at night.
Someone beautiful.
Someone who might be famous one day.
Someone who would grow old
with a scrapbook full of memories.

Her name was Anna Goodspeed.
You probably never heard of her.

It's not like I planned to be an only child.
It's not like I planned to drift to sleep to the sound
of my own voice whispering stories in my own
lonely head. What I planned was a little sister in a bed
just the other side of my narrow room, to whisper back
and giggle and say “It's Addie's fault” when our mom
came to the door and gave us one last warning
to settle down because “tomorrow is a school day.”
I would have taken a big brother if a little sister
wasn't available, one who would give me piggyback rides
and teach me knock-knock jokes and say “If those girls
at school bother you again, let me take care of it.”

There was a time I had both, a little sister I watched over
and a big brother watching over me. Sometimes all three of us
would sit on the sofa sharing a big bowl of popcorn, even though
if you had walked through the room you would have seen
only me sitting there, my hands passing the bowl back and
forth. You would have heard only my voice laughing
at the parts of the movie we all thought were hysterical.

Maybe this is what it's like for all only children: To love
the family that isn't almost as much as the one that is.

Oh, I don't know if I love DuShawn. I mean,
we're only thirteen. When you come right down to it,
I probably love my cats more, even if DuShawn is the one
who holds my hand and gives me presents and private looks
and never coughs a hairball into my shoe.

But then it'll be late at night and the cats will be off somewhere
doing whatever cats do late at night and my phone will buzz
and it will be a text message saying
sweet dreams
and I'll text back
you too
and I don't know. Maybe that's love.

Grandma is rocking out to Joni Mitchell,
her hips moving slower than the beat and
trying hard to catch up. She winks when
she catches me watching.

“Oh, I do love me my Joni Mitchell,” she says.
“Do you love you your Joni Mitchell, Addie?”
“I do love me my Joni Mitchell, Grandma.”

Soon we are rocking out together, our hips
catching the beat and riding it like a wave.

That's her there,
in the photo with the tear in the corner
and the thumbprint
that can't be wiped away,
wearing shiny white boots up over her knees
and shiny blond hair down past her waist
and a skirt so short you'd think
her mother wouldn't have let her
out of the house.
“Who made you such a prude?” Grandma asked
when I told her that. “I'm still that wild
and crazy girl, Addie, somewhere
behind these drugstore glasses,
somewhere deep inside.”

Last summer Grandma took me to a museum
down in Bethel so I could see for myself
what her generation was all about. “Three days
of peace and music” is what they called
the Woodstock Festival. The summer of 1969.
There was a line to get into the museum. “Old hippies
like me,” Grandma joked. “But this is nothing.
You should have seen it then. Four hundred
thousand of us. Girls and boys, women and men, and oh
the performers! Joplin and Baez, Country Joe,
Hendrix, Arlo, the Grateful Dead.” Grandma shook
her head as we walked past the photos of
the hippies dancing in the mud, the flowers,
the flowing hair, the flashing eyes, the swirling
capes, the sun, and then
the rain
and the rain
and the rain
that never
wanted
to stop.
The gypsy clothes and for some no clothes at all.
I blushed. “Did
you
. . .” I started to ask, and then
it hit me how there was so much I didn't know,
how my grandma was once a girl
who lived in a time I think of as history.
My grandma in her high white boots
and her short short skirt was a mystery I
would never solve, only glimpse in photos and
moments she chose to share.

“I thought it would go on forever,” she said,
“that life would always be that good, people
would always be that kind, the music
would never end. How funny to go to a museum
and see your life frozen in time.”