The Geography of Girlhood (4 page)

It’s the first day of summer and

the sun rises like a giant, dumb saucer.

I take the dogs and

sit outside in the gory heat

waiting for Tara to come home

and face all the trouble that can’t help

but flare up around her.

She’s been out all night

and I try to picture what she was doing and with whom,

but it’s about as easy as trying to picture

dying or being born.

The heat is starting to slap me around now

and after I fill the dog dishes with water,

I sit there and wonder

if there will ever be a mystery inside of me

like there is inside my sister—

something bright and fast and wonderful,

something awful and true, something

that cannot be stamped out

no matter how many ways

our father tries to stamp it out.

Summer has lost all control of itself

when Tara’s car pulls in the drive.

Our father waits at the door for her,

fighting the heat.

My sister gets out and gives me a little wave

before she goes to face him,

and I sit there,

waiting for the noise to start,

watching as the dogs run wild around the yard,

eating things that will make them sick later,

bringing back things the rest of us thought

were long since buried and gone.

Every July my sister goes

to be a camp counselor

and I get sent south,

away from the sea and the pines

and to the flat land of boy cousins

and tumbleweeds.

Even though we’re too old for it

the boy cousins and I play marbles all summer long,

the banter of glass globes

in the lap of my summer dresses.

Always, the sex of cousins smells sharper

than that of the boys back home,

especially this summer,

the summer before high school,

with the liquid flood of marbles all around,

the print of lineoleum on my cheek,

the beer bread crumbs

dug in my knees.

This must be the start of the sweet and hungry days,

out here in the overgrown acres of forever

with the boy cousins,

because I feel like soon I will taste sin firsthand

and maybe even the way I smile, or walk,

even the way I roll the marbles

across that endless floor,

will surely give me away.

There’s a guy here who looks just like you, Bobby.

He’s got sideburns and a sunburn. He’s a loser and a

sycophant. Trouble is, he says the most beautiful things,

walks the most beautiful walk. First day I saw him,

I thought,
There he is, the fool I’ll fall for.
He calls

Tamakwa “summer camp for the hormonally insane.”

He thinks he’s clever and oh my God, he is. He’s not

wasteful like you are, he doesn’t waste my time with

stories about cousins or killers. The stories he tells, they

get right to the point, like a dog’s nose to a crotch.

Your stories never had much of a point and if they did,

I never understand how you got to it. This guy, he’s

special in a stupid kind of way. He knows how not

to hurt me, he knows how to bring up his girlfriend

casually in conversation, he knows better than to lay

himself in front of me and hold out a hand that could

mean either “Stop” or “Come Closer.”.

My sister and I come home to find

that our father has spawned with Susan,

his bride-to-be that wants to get married at sea.

I’m in the catch and release program
,

she likes to say, thinking it’s funny

that she’s had more boyfriends

than there are salmon in the jetty these days.

As we’re motoring out to the harbor,

I look at my father, cheeks flushed,

new wedding ring burning a hole in his pocket.

As he steers us across the shallow part of the shoal,

I try not to think of my mother,

instead I look at my sister,

who’s wearing Bobby’s leather jacket

and not even trying to hide her latest hickey,

and Susan, the brand-new bride

who is tagging my father with a kiss and a vow

before one day she releases him

back into the wild.

One day he was a kid three grades below me,

and the next we’re related.

He’s more disgusting than the parts of a fish

you throw in the trash.

Fortunately, he doesn’t say much to me,

except for
pass that
at the dinner table

or
are you finished?
when referring to the bathroom

or food of yours he wants to eat.

He’s always down at the docks,

collecting marine life, the kind that stinks when it dies.

His glasses are big like goggles

and for a person I’d prefer knowing nothing about,

why do I have to accidentally see him naked at least
once a month?

His mother is always saying how

he needs a positive male role model

and I agree.

He’s in desperate need of a dad

but one thing’s for sure:

he’s not getting mine.

Randall Faber called me today to wish me a happy

birthday and I said
thank you
and he asked me
what’d

you do?
and I told him
I went to North Carolina to see

my relatives and when I got back I had a whole new

family
. Actually, I didn’t say that last part.

Randall told me he spent his summer building an

add-on to his kitchen with his dad and his brothers.

Also, he got a new dog.

I picture the Faber family—a gang of boys and a mom

that makes the meals and a dinner table full of people

that know how to love each other in a regular way.

It sounds nice, I say, and Randall says it is, and he

asks how Elaine is and I say we’re not really friends

anymore, and he asks how Denise is, and I say I’d

rather not talk about it and then we say goodbye,

and that’s it.

Denise is sick in the head

and has been since June,

when she killed something for the first time.

Her father gave her traps for the kitchen and den

and orchestrated their placement,

as if he were back in Da Nang,

festooning the forest with a collar of landmines.

I was sleeping over

the night he gave out the orders,

and in the morning, we collected the bodies

and bagged them before breakfast—

three rigid mice and one warm one,

soft and barely bleeding,

fresh from the thunder of running from cats.

We took them out to the trash

and there, under the rotting elm,

Denise’s sobs were the sound of a prom dress

being taken off in a parking lot—

slick and satiny and torn.

Her father, all bourbon eyes and confiscated heart,

didn’t like tears

and refused us food

until they were dry and gone.

Now, Denise can’t wait to kill things.

Last week, slain beasts were taking the form of

cats and squirrels, then birds and bees,

and now she’s got her sights on

boys from the neighborhood and beyond,

some of them so big they could only be called men.

She’s ready for them all to fall down, one by one,

until the town is littered with creatures

whose hearts she’s broken,

with me, faithful witness, following just behind,

tagging the bodies

so the next of kin

can always be notified.

Today is my fifteenth birthday

so Tara is playing the part of Perfect Sister,

beautiful on the half-shell,

experienced but never vampy.

Oh, I know, she has her problems:

the way she couldn’t stop knitting

that scarf for Susan for Christmas

(it just grew and grew, an avenue of red yarn),

the broken curfews, the pregnancy scare,

the tendency to do everything

everyone tells her
not
to do.

But all in all, she’s a pretty picture,

teeth white as the sky,

eyes marshy and green as Florida.

With her lipstick that matches the moon,

she’s telling loaves of lies,

saying she never starts fights,

saying she’s gained weight, really she has.

She goes on and on,

sipping from a bottle of something

swiped from the berth below

and leaning against me in quieter moments,

whispering
I love you
as we round the point,

just before Dad drops the mainsail

and with the sure hand of a father,

takes us back to shore.

When we get home from our sail,

all sunburned and salty,

I walk into my room

and find a boy I barely know

reading my diary.

He’s got it open to my list of Favorite Foods

(I told you my diary was stupid)

and I scream
What are you doing?!

My stepbrother leaps up and runs out

and I slam the door in his face

and after a moment I hear him say,

like tacos, too.

But when I open the door, he’s gone.

Don’t tell Elaine
, Denise says

when she shows me the medication the doctor
put her on.

Don’t tell Denise
, Elaine says

during the only phone call we have all summer,

the one where she brags about having sex with
Stan Bondurant.

Don’t tell my mom
, my stepbrother says

after I catch him feeding a stray cat

outside our house.

I’m usually not a person people trust with their secrets

but in two weeks school starts

and it’s obvious to everyone that after that,

the only place I’ll be taking those secrets

is to the grave.

The harbor is alive with motors

and the sun is shining or something like it

and the Sound is full of jellyfish

and the gulls are flirting with their catch

before they come to kill it.

I am down at the dock

trying with all my might

to stop summer from ending

and so is Larry in slip 15

who’s had enough of his life

so he just drinks his way through it,

or the guy who lives on the tugboat

that my stepmom says might sink,

but no matter what, the spangle and spell of school

is coming for me like a tide I can’t stop,

it’s coming for me like a storm off the coast,

it’s coming for me like a spark that sets the
forest aflame

and while all the girls are like bulbs about to bloom,

me, I am trying to stay dug down in the dirt

because I know what is waiting for me

when I come out.

3

Don’t ask me why, but

I’ve decided that being afraid of Jenny Arnold

is more powerful than being in love.

Love isn’t five feet nine like Jenny Arnold is.

Love doesn’t drive a lime green Barracuda the way
Jenny Arnold does.

And love won’t kill you like Jenny Arnold will.

On the drive to school, I ask my sister

if she’ll protect me from what’s about to happen.

My sister just laughs.

She can’t wait for me to die so she can get my room.

When we get to school,