Girlchild

  slow learner

  Halfway through fifth grade, Mr. Lombroso calls Mama to the school to talk to her again. Mama does her hair and wears a blouse and clean blue jeans and Mr. Lombroso wears his patient face and gives me his pen cup. It says I Heart Bingo and I want to steal his letter opener that has the twin roaring heads of the Lions Club on its handle. Instead, I sit on the brown, scratchy carpet and write the alphabet once with each of his pens while Mr. Lombroso shows Mama another piece of paper with a bar graph like the Reno skyline and my name at the top. I draw a line of O’s, blue-pink-black. He says how glad he is that I’m “feeling better since my sickness,” and Mama nods quickly at the lie we both told, all of us told, a story for why I went so quiet through most of third grade so well-crafted it’s still remembered almost two years later. Mr. Lombroso talks to her about my amazing percentiles, I connect my O’s and make an amazing centipede. The scores, he says, “are an indication of serious college potential.”

  The only person we know going to college is Alex on Family Ties, but Mr. Lombroso sounds so happy that Mama tries to be happy too. That’s not how she looks, though, and at the end of all his talking she says, “But what do we do now?” He takes a deep breath and starts over again, using different words that don’t sound foreign on Calle soil, that don’t darken the room like a cloud of summer mosquitoes, leaving us slapping at air. Finally Mama catches one and holds on. The one that buzzes at the end of this sentence, stinger ready: the Washoe County Spelling Bee.

  blue collar

  After recess it’s ABC order till we get through the door and Harris comes before Hendrix. Stephanie Harris is a little bit bigger than me, a little bit neater, and even if she ever talked to me I wouldn’t tell her that I know there’s exactly fourteen freckles that march from her red hair and down into the back of her dress. So when Stephanie Harris turns around and says, “I was just wondering, Rory Dawn, does your mom work nights?” I’m so surprised she’s even talking to me, I’m so busy trying to feel from the inside if I have any playground dirt on my face, I tell her the truth even though she must already know it because the Calle isn’t big enough for career secrets. “At the Truck Stop,” I say, and I must be dirty after all because Stephanie crinkles her nose even before I have a chance to count the freckles running across the top of it. She looks past me at Jena-with-one-n, two spots down. “No wonder she has so much time to read the dictionary, Jen. Her mom is a bartender.” Jena-with-one-n says, “That’s a blue-collar job,” and Stephanie laughs, her pretty teeth sparkling. She turns the back of her clean, white collar to me, the tag tucked perfectly inside, fourteen freckles in line, and the whistle sounds our march into class.

  swing

  Mama wore a bright pink shirt to her job at Circus Circus where she got a job running keno the first months we were here. She hated that shirt because it soaked up all her sweat and cigarette smoke and she hated it because it was the color of carnations given at funerals and after shootings and she hated it because it was part of a uniform and uniforms make the people who wear them disappear. Still, every night those first months, when I was four and she was thirty-four, she put on her uniform and I put on my PJ’s so I could get right in bed when she dropped me at Grandma’s before heading downtown.

  Mama worked graveyard at first because everyone has to start at the bottom and at the bottom is the graveyard shift. Only the most desperate gamblers and drunkards hole up in the casino’s twenty-four-hour restaurants, wearing the keno crayons to nubs, marking their same lucky numbers over and over again, handing their tickets and dollars to girls in sheer shirts and miniskirts, or short-shorts and fishnets, depending on the runner’s age. Keno runs all night and so do the girls. A new game starts three or four times an hour, and tickets are picked up and run to a booth where they’re handed over to women who can’t qualify as girls any longer because their varicose veins finally forced them off the floor and into pants, women whose paychecks might have been lost to fallen asses and arches but were saved by their ability to do gambler’s math. These ladies fade behind the glass, marking each ticket’s crayoned circles over with a stroke of ink before crunching the numbers, deciding the losses, and returning the tickets to the young ones, like my mama was, or was pretending to be, and the young ones run the tickets back across the floor to customers not smart enough to go home after last call. Customers who were drunk when they came in but get more and more sober with each blackened keno ticket and each dollar lost chasing numbers that will surely come up next time. Graveyard is six feet deep, no matter how bright a pink uniform lights up the dead night, and graveyard is where Mama learned to say “Fuck you very much” instead of “Thank you very much,” but to say it quick and innocent so that men who were busier studying her keno-runner’s legs than studying their tickets weren’t sure if they’d just been told off or come on to.

  pierce

  CURRENT FUNCTIONING

  HENDRIX, Johanna #310,788

  The four boys attend De Laveaga School where it is felt all the children have been affected by the upheavals and divorce in the home. Anonymous telephone calls have reached the social worker, reporting there is inadequate supervision for the children while Mrs. Hendrix is frequently out of the home. A questionnaire was passed to the school class, and favorite TV programs were listed. The selections of the boys showed preference for shows that appear during the week at very late hours.

  V. White:wr

  10-21-69

  Some things never change, so if anyone’s keeping track of how late I stay up and what I watch on the tube: I like M*A*S*H and Family Ties best. Family Ties because the dad’s beard is soft like his voice and the mom’s teeth are crooked and she smiles sweet anyway, but M*A*S*H is my new favorite since Mama had to start back on nights at the Truck Stop because the money on the night shift got too hard to pass up. With no one to stop me, I spend a lot of time watching TV, because TV-watching’s easier than watching my ownself, and M*A*S*H is the only show that stops me from hearing how creaks at the door turn into footsteps, stops me from running to the phone to dial the sounds away, until pretty soon the phone that I’ve been ringing at the Truck Stop stops being answered altogether.

  It’s because of Hawkeye. Hawkeye helps me find what I’m looking for when I call and call again to every Calle bar to see when Mama’s coming home: belief that everything will be all right. And it isn’t because he’s the funniest guy on television, or because he’s a doctor. It’s because even in the dust and the dirt and the cold, Hawkeye doesn’t quit. Even when he’s up to his elbows in blood, and bombs are falling, and the lights won’t stay on, he doesn’t walk away. Hawkeye will save your life no matter where you come from or who sent you, no matter what color your uniform is or whether you have a uniform at all.

  I don’t need a questionnaire about TV time passed around the classroom to understand that my knowing Hawkeye top to bottom means that Mama’s mothering isn’t exactly by the book. But like Mama says, “Fuck you very much,” because at the Truck Stop she doesn’t have to wear a uniform. The only pink that blushes in that smoky air comes from her Shirley Temples, which are sugar sweet and full up to the top with maraschino cherries. When it was Grandma’s shift, she always pushed plain ginger ales on me, saying, “You carry them cherries around just like swallowed gum,” and if that’s true, I must be positively full of maraschino cherries, but like “adequate supervision,” Mama can’t worry much about that. This trailer was bought with bartending money, and the lot under it, and the furniture inside of it, the woodstove that warms us up, and I’m full of cherries and the tip jar is full of silver. A quick pour and a friendly smile feel like a lifesaver to a lot of people. And the Calle is kind of a war zone, the enemy is all around us, the enemy is us. We’re so pent up we can’t even trust ourselves, let alone each other, and just when you think you’re going to get some R&R there’s another emergency on the horizon, and to top it all off the food is terrible. But mainly, there’s wounded everywhere and that’s what the ba
rs are for, to house the wounded. Tending bar is a triage all its own.

  the nurture of your emergency

  One word for each step. “Don’t. Be. Drunk. Don’t. Be. Drunk.” It only takes 237 rounds to get from the back gate of Roscoe Elementary to the driveway of our house. “Don’t. Be …” 248 rounds to get to the porch. When I was in fourth grade it took 288. “Don’t.” I am quiet at the door but the words ring loud in my head, 252 rounds to the recycle bin. It works. Mama hasn’t opened her first beer yet. What she has done is brought home a new dining room table. New to us.

  The table is dark golden wood and has claw feet and a leaf to make it big enough to have six people eat at once, even though it will only have the two of us ever because Mama’s boyfriends don’t come over for the purpose of enjoying her cooking. The top is so shiny I can see my reflection and over on the other side, the reflection of Mama’s upside-down face. She is happy, beaming a smile that is a huge frown from where I am, watching her in the tabletop, and I am about to smile back when she starts in, without even a hello, without wasting another breath on the new table she must have emptied the tip jar for, and then some.

  “When I die, this is yours.”

  I don’t want to watch this old scene in the new tabletop. Another thing that started when Grandma left, Mama’s talk of her own leaving and what to do about it. What goes to me when she dies, her wedding ring, the hope chest. What goes to my brothers, her truck, the woodstove. Ashes and papers. I’m so pissed that she’s starting in again that when the lightbulb over the new dining room table burns out with a POP! I feel like I caused it.

  The table goes blank and I’m unstuck, free to look at Mama’s actual face but I’m sick of yelling like I always do, “Shut up, Mama, you are not going to die,” sick of whispering, “Mama, please. Please don’t go.” Instead I say, “It’s a nice table, Mom, all right?” and go to get a fresh lightbulb.

  “Are you ready?” Mama asks from where she is standing on a chair, one hand on its back, the other on the burnt-out bulb over the new table. I’m right where she wants me, at the phone, holding it with my shoulder, ready to dial 9-1-1 at first sign of electric spark.

  I roll my eyes as she stands still, waiting. “Just let me do it,” I say.

  She tightens her grip on the chair and her forehead is starting to shine. She is afraid of electric shock and heights, even this small height, the height from our plastic dining room chair, and I give up.

  “I know our address, Mama, I know what to say. Go ahead.”

  She takes a deep breath and begins the slow turn of the bulb. It moves and I guess it’s the lack of shock that scares her now because she stops and laughs and shakes the tightness out of her hand. She starts turning the bulb again. The room fills with the sound of metal scraping metal and I let the phone slide from my shoulder, place it back in the cradle.

  do a good turn daily

  At Roscoe, it’s easy to tell the Calle kids from the ones who live closer to town. Our pants and pencils are shorter, our homework is handed in with creases from being folded into pockets, not drawn flat and clean from Pee-Chee folders that scream “Wham!” and “I Love Ricky Schroder Forever!” like Stephanie Harris’s do. We don’t bring cupcakes on our birthdays, and I am the only one, from either side of the tracks, who brings flowers.

  Timmy is a Calle kid. His mom might go downtown to get her hair done, but she still only gets as far as the Truck Stop on weekend nights. Timmy’s in third grade now but he still brings his toy truck to school and powers it through the dirt by himself every recess. The truck is homemade out of glossy wood that is bolted together so that the cab turns to follow in whatever direction it gets pulled by the yarn tied through its bumper. I wonder which of his mom’s boyfriends made him that thing and made promises to come back and play with him again. The promises, I think, must be what give that truck the power to go, and go it does, no matter who makes fun of it or him. I don’t tease him, but I don’t talk to him either. If Timmy motors near me, I act like we never played together in Grandma’s backroom, like I never twisted the grubby blue yarn around my wrist and pulled his truck through her yard.

  Timmy and I may be dirty Calle freaks, but we aren’t the same kind, or that’s what I think until the announcement comes across the speakers about the Spelling Bee finals and my name echoes loud and scratchy through every classroom at Roscoe Elementary. Mrs. Bivings claps but no one else does, and I’m so embarrassed that only teachers like me that when we’re let out for recess my face is still hot and I spend a long time at the water fountain waiting for it to cool down. Timmy comes up to me and says, “That’s really cool, R.D.” He calls me R.D. like we’re family or something. “That’s so cool about the Spelling Bee,” he says.

  And before he can motor off, before I even wipe the water that is still dripping down my chin, I’ve got his truck in my hands. I think I’m going to break it, smash it against the playground’s asphalt, but the next thing I know I’m running for the back fence. I can hear Timmy running behind me and his voice is wet and high, “R.D., wait up, wait,” but there’s no waiting and there’s no way for him to catch up, my legs are two grades longer than his. When I get to the chain link, I throw the truck over. It turns end over end, the yarn making crazy loops and curls until it lands in a cloud of sagebrush and dirt on the other side.

  Timmy grabs onto the fence and we both stand there gripping the links and breathing hard, looking at his precious truck that is out-of-bounds now till school is out. Even from the fence there’s no escaping the voices of Stephanie and Jena-with-one-n singing their idiotic recess songs behind us, I know without looking that they’re holding hands and kicking like Harrah’s showgirls, “Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider! Girls go to Mars to get more candy bars!” I’m waiting for Timmy to yell or tell on me, but he just stares at his truck, mouth open, so I keep my eyes on the wooden wheels gleaming in the sun and move my hand down slowly, link by link, until our hands are close enough to touch and my knuckles rub against his. I want to tell him that it didn’t break, that it’ll still be there after school. I want to tell him that I’m sorry, but then the bell rings and all I do is grab his hand before he can move and hold it, one second, before we go to line up for our classrooms, and neither one of us says a word.

  proficiency badge: god’s eye

  Symbol: A window framed by curtains yellow and bright as flame

  To earn this badge do four of these activities, the three starred are required.

  1. Steal scraps of yarn from Grandma’s lowest basket. Intermediate: Act as if you didn’t notice the next knitted surprise she had hidden at the basket’s bottom. Advanced: Take yarn in all the colors of the Girl Scout Badges you plan on earning but will never officially receive.

  2. After the Ice Cream Man is gone, search the Calle for used popsicle sticks. Put pairs together in the shape of a cross. Do not wash them. Sugar is Mother Nature’s glue.

  3. Wrap the yarn over, under, and around the arms of your popsicle crosses, creating a diamond or “eye” pattern. Make one God’s Eye for each badge earned. Intermediate: Award the God’s Eyes to yourself in official ceremony. Advanced: Make a short but formal speech of gratitude as you accept your God’s-Eye badges.

  4. Be ashamed of having made God’s Eyes as you grow older and come to realize that they are considered kitsch. Advanced: Stay abreast of what is considered kitsch.

  5. When you are older than that, be ashamed of having been ashamed. Intermediate: Begin saving popsicle sticks. Advanced: Award God’s Eyes to yourself and others in official ceremony before displaying them proudly in windows and from rearview mirrors.

  mayfly

  Insects fall under Nature in the Girl Scout Handbook and I swallow my fear and try to earn points toward my Insect badge by learning the difference between butterfly and moth antennae, just what is a “true bug,” and the work behind collecting live ones to raise. For every one I remove from the dangers of the drain or the broom, there’s another puttin
g down stakes behind the toaster, in the corner of the shower, and Mama, who’s afraid of everything now since Grandma left, everything but men, is screaming for me to come and kill it. I try to save them, but pushing them around with jars and newspapers only maims them, severs limbs, breaks wings, defeats the purpose, so I start letting them live where they are. I push the toaster closer to the wall, shout “Got it!” loud enough for Mama to hear, move the curtain just so to hide a carefully crafted home, and think of Grandma:

  Because it was my Bird-day, Pigeon sent a present. A most unusual gift—a new flyswatter. It is on my wall along with my picture of you. In one corner of this swatter’s business end a small hole has been cut & a logo on the handle explains, “Even flies deserve a chance.” Think about that!

  And think about it, I do. And about how hard it is to believe in chances, but how much harder it is to let that idea go, with Grandma’s words lining up so sure and strong in her slanting felt-tip, letter after letter, another lesson in the strength of an old gambler’s faith. But if Grandma’s right, and there’s a chance of slipping through the swatter, if the great hand holding it lets me fly free, it’ll mean that I got the opening and everyone else got left behind. Mama already feels so alone here with Grandma gone that I can’t see leaving either of them, no matter how flat our future.