Buck and Hendrix. We are each three generations, a trifecta, but don’t lay your money down just yet. Both our mamas’ and grandmas’ races have already been run and while Viv and I barrel along, neck and neck, we are still third-generation bastards surely on the road to whoredom. Dirty, white, and poor. We’re pure as the driven slush.
There’s no way out of the trap of your own blood, short of spilling it, science said so and Justice Holmes agreed. Regardless of Viv’s small achievement, that she made the honor roll the spring before her death when the wisteria that grows strong and stubborn in Southern gardens was just blooming, by that time, science and the State had already moved on to other business and no one noticed either her accomplishment or her passing. Viv died from a stomach ailment when she was eight years old, or so the encyclopedia tells me. Its authors are as unalarmed by this piece of information as by all the atrocities that have come before and spare no surprise for what comes after: that at the publication of the fourth edition of the Academic American, in 1984, Holmes’s ruling still had not been officially overturned. The encyclopedia may have learned not to hold its breath for justice, but I’m getting blue in the face.
Viv and I share this history. These are our mothers and the beliefs that touch us and the words that judge us and like the entries in the encyclopedia, there’s no keeping just the good parts and separating the rest. Mothers and grandmothers might align Viv and me but the Man does the rest. We’re like shoes tied tight together and thrown over electrical wire; every pulse going through that wire goes right through us. The rain makes us heavy the same way, the sun dries us out and then hardens us, cracks us where we used to bend, the wind sends us swinging. The only way to get free, of our families—of this place—is to tear our very selves apart, to say good-bye and go on alone, so we hang here and wait for the County to send someone out to clean us up.
I’m pretty sure that Viv never got to be a real Girl Scout, coming as she did from a place like the Calle, where patches are for mending and oaths are only muttered underneath the breath. But if Vivian Buck, feebleminded daughter of a feebleminded daughter, herself the product of feebleminded stock, if that girl had lived, she’d be in my troop, and with three fingers raised in Promise we’d show them just what the third generation can do.
girl scout hand book
Some of the things that belong to Scouts and Guides of the whole world are: the Promise, the Laws, and the Handshake. These fall under the heading “International Guiding and Scouting,” and the distinction must be made and notice taken that excepting these basic tenets, we Girl Scouts of the United States, even those wasting away troopless in the deserts of Reno, are very different from them, the Scouts of the Philippines and Czechoslovakia, for example, who await our used books and toys, and those who, if the Handbook’s illustrations are on-their-honor true, lie abed in sanitariums in France. Excepting the oath taken and the laws followed, excepting the ways we must partner for safety, the way Viv partnered with me, the miracle of our palms creasing each into each as we looked both ways before crossing Calle streets, excepting this brief sisterhood of our held hands, complications of which the Handbook never discusses, one thing is made perfectly clear: there is no lasting fellowship here. We connect through its pages but close the book and we become just what we were. Alone.
This, from the Intermediate Program of the Girl Scout Handbook. Girl Scout being among the most impermanent of titles, its fleeting description marches across the page with no concern for its mortality. Capital letters stand stiff and proud like the future leaders they beckon, through chapters on propriety and promise only to be abandoned on page 504 under the heading “How to Become a Senior Girl Scout.” We are left suddenly in uniforms grown too small, our wrists stretching from their cuffs as bare as the page.
Girl Scout describes child, female, who holds the book first with both hands. Hands that are too small to bend the spine and crease the page alone, they bear the weight together until, grown up now, one hand is enlisted to twirling wisps of hair around an index finger, while its mate loses her place against the margins when the shouts from the boys’ camp filter in through the trees. She raises her eyes from the page, better to hear the deep newness of Boy Scouts’ voices promising they’ll grow up to be Eagles, and her voice, her words and oaths and promises, to “do a good turn daily” and “do my duty to God and Country,” fade into the past while she moves forward on a future Eagle Scout’s arm. These girls’ sashes will be put away and preserved for the next generation, or sold at thrift stores, or used to tie up curtains at daybreak, to flood sunshine into a room and reveal dust as it floats by the hard-earned patch that says “Cookie Champ 1977,” the patch that says “Eager Reader.” These specks call the once-future leaders to attention. Hands that imagined finer tools and greater work, young hands that saluted straight, now curl to their housework. Broom and duster are secured by hands flecked with gemstone and silver, spotted with age, and worn with the care of little scouts of their own.
tour of duty
Mama allowed me to be in danger, and the kind she most feared. As she would say, and she would say sadly, and to no one named Jack, “That’s the fact, Jack.” It’s confusing and outrageous and it is a fact and it’s starting to make sense. It makes sense because Mama was in danger once too, and when she was, she lost true north. Maybe if she’d gotten help, joined a Girl Scout troop for example, memorized the “Compasses, finding directions without” section in the Handbook, it wouldn’t have taken her so long, too long, to get it back.
Mama’s compass spins round and round, lands Mama in strange lands, and me with her. Santa Cruz for starters, Reno next, we might land anywhere. Next stop, Vietnam, where the mopeds and motorbikes run like salmon up a stream and the riders wear few helmets and there are fewer upheld laws and even fewer traffic lights. The families ride together along with their groceries and livestock and Mama and I ride right beside them, just like Grandma did, all her daughters on board. It’s dangerous to ride without a helmet, a little girl on the handlebars, but it’s the only way we know how to get around. How can Mama explain to me what safety looks like? How does a woman raised on the handlebars of a speeding moped explain a seatbelt? It seemed a safe perch to Mama, the handlebars of the moped of our life, her compass spinning like the speedometer as we barreled through.
But what do I know about Vietnam and its circus of bikes, anyway? What old copy of National Geographic did I pull that out of? It’s just that I’m starting to realize how in the dark Mama was, so much so that even if she’d known that Carol left me alone with the Hardware Man, she wouldn’t have stopped it. She looked at Carol, who seemed okay, who put on the same show I tried to, and saw exactly what she never saw in herself, confidence, and so she thought Carol’s dad a safe dad, just like everyone on the Calle did. Until they didn’t. Until they realized the stranger bringing the danger was right next door, a man they hardly knew they didn’t know. Mama couldn’t read the signs, not by herself, her sign-reader got jammed up way too long ago, and instead of hating her for it, this tour of Vietnam is my attempt at finding a light to forgive her by.
word problem
A man with 9 fingers has 4 times as many male grandchildren as female, and 3 times as much regret. The amount of regret is equal to the number of times his shoulder has been dislocated from the recoil of a shotgun blast at 21 foot-pounds of force per bullet multiplied by the number of times he has been called a dirtbag to his face. Given the number of shell casings littering the bedroom floor and the number of shells ready in the box, how many of his original 4 daughters have been deafened by gunshot?
(Show all of your work.)
a. The jar holds 5 times as many pennies as nickels.
b. Each team will need to load 12 bags of dirt.
c. The mother will purchase 22.4 yards of gingham fabric.
d. The shotgun blast echoes for at least 3 generations.
triangle
I never did talk to Mama about the Hardware Man. H
e had his threats: don’t fucking say anything to anyone ever. She had hers: I’ll kill anyone who tries. And they ran together: I’ll fucking kill anyone who tries to say anything to anyone ever. Even after he was gone, I kept my mouth shut. The ember tip of her cigarette was too bright. I was stuck between a scary place and a scary place, so I just waited it out, waited for questions that never came, and after it was all over, except in my dreams, I tried to forget. But one night, long after the Hardware Man and Carol had gone, after I started watching my ownself, tucking myself in when Mama worked nights, on one of the rare nights off that she stayed home, Mama comes into the living room where I’m watching Family Ties and stands there smoking until a commercial. And then she turns down the volume and speaks his name, and through the wail of blood in my ears I hear her say that he, “Uncle—” the blood rushes through my ears so that parts of what she says are drowned in the roar, but I hear there was a fall off a slick roof, something about rain and the roll of duct tape he’d been using to fix a leak falling down after him. And the uncle who isn’t an uncle is paralyzed from the neck down.
She doesn’t take her eyes from the TV and I don’t take my eyes from her hand, steady, her fingers wrapped around a can of warm Diet Pepsi, Jim Beam inside. Don’t take my eyes from her cigarette angling between her fingers, from her wedding ring sparkling in the blues and grays from our quiet set.
“Oh,” I say, because someone’s got to say something, still watching the fire burning down to the filter, wondering how it all holds together, how the ashes build on nothing, cling to nothing except maybe being warm and next to each other.
She stands that way until the commercials end, then she taps the ash off into her palm, takes a drag. “Carol is all right,” she says, pausing, “now. Thought you’d want to know.” When she says Carol’s name, I can hear it just fine, there’s no blood rushing, no fear, and it hits me that I do want to know that she’s okay. I’ve wanted to know this for a long time and my voice is thick when I say, “Thanks, Ma.” It’s my first and only thanks for all Mama did, no matter how late she did it, and for all of us she did it for, herself too. The thanks feels like a wave pushing out of me, and I watch it wash over her where she stands, looking at me now.
“Sleep good,” she says then, and turns the volume back up. The Keaton family’s voices fill the space between us as she walks down the hallway to her room, almost drowning her “girlchild” as she closes her door. And I decide I don’t need a TV mom to sing me to sleep tonight after all, so I turn off the television and go to bed.
lesson plan
Whatever satisfaction Mama got about seeing my fake uncle’s taillights disappear off the Calle, she didn’t rejoice about his accident. There’s no room for rejoicing here. The only tiny bit of joy comes from the reassurance that, no matter how flawed the County is, or how blind the judgments of the State, there is a greater order at work, and like a pink morning sky, you can bet it means business. Mama did her best, short of bringing the County down around our ears, and trusted the rest of the work to the karmic police, the only force that’s ever done us any good. Everything that goes around on the Calle makes its way back, and waits at your door for you to trip over and break your fool neck. That’s why the Hardware Man’s accident doesn’t surprise Mama or me. Leaving the Calle won’t get you free of justice. It found the Hardware Man, wherever he went, and taught him the lesson he had coming. Taught him what it feels like to lie very, very still.
hypotenoose
If the lengths of any two sides of a right triangle are known, the length of the third side can be found. Let ABC represent a right triangle, with the right angle located at B. The altitude from point B to point A is as tall as the shadow of a man and a new triangle is created. If the legs of the new triangle are 12 inches long and 9 inches long, and a little girl is 1/2 the height of the man’s shadow at midday, use the Pythagorean theorem to answer the following question: What is taking place inside of this triangle?
(Show all of your work.)
a. Things like this do not happen in right triangles.
b. The darkness is overcome by degrees.
c. Roots are being squared.
d. The little girl will.
will
“When I die this is yours,” Mama says, and this is her hope chest and this is her wedding ring and this is the bookcase with Gibran and Kerouac way at the top. And she says, “I want to be cremated,” and cremated means her body isn’t buried, because she says, “Save the land for the cows.” She says she wants her ash body taken to California and spread out on Starvation Ridge, because “God knows I deserve that,” and Starvation Ridge is where my brothers were born and might have died, and her with them, because she tried once, and failed, obviously, or we wouldn’t be here talking about her regrets. And deserve means she expects to be punished for that death wish forever, and by her nonstop talking about it, it seems like it can’t come fast enough to suit her. And finally, she says, “No machines,” and by machines she means at the hospital to keep her body alive, because the whole point of all this is that Mama is going to die.
This is her list, I know it by heart, I have for years now, but I don’t know what brings on the telling or how to make her stop. Too much pink in a sunset or breeze through a window, too much beer in her blood or not enough, and Mama’s eyes roll like the reels on a slot machine. Come up sevens and our house is afire with cursing, come up tilt and she curls up quiet to sleep, come up like headlights over a mountain range and Mama has one foot in the grave and this list on her lips, because you can’t just give death your number and expect him not to call. Just like anyone else she ever flirted with, Mama knows he’ll be back.
nails, how to drive
“It’s time we had wall-to-wall carpeting, Sunshine,” Mama says over her coffee cup one morning, and since there isn’t a man worth a good shag within a hammer’s throw of the Calle any more, she’s going to do it her damn self.
I never thought anything was wrong with the old linoleum-carpet mix, but Mama’s got this big idea, and her big idea means that half the living room is now particle board, and that every payday I have to go with her to the Carpet Store to guarantee the single-mom sympathy discount. The Carpet Store stinks like plastic and stings my nose, my nose that’s out of joint already because of the tightness of Mama’s jeans. She always wears her tightest jeans to the Carpet Store in case the single-mom routine doesn’t work, and because she knows when she does the Carpet Man’ll be sure to watch her leave, which means he’ll be even more sure to have a pile of samples saved for her the next time we come and might even throw in a few for free. The one time I do try to balk, I tell her that I had a rough day at school, turn on The People’s Court, and throw myself on the couch in my best impersonation of teenagers from television. The Honorable Judge Joseph A. Wapner is just taking his seat when Mama slings her purse over one shoulder and turns off the TV.
“Put your shoes back on, R.D.”
I’ve already seen this episode, the one about the missing bird, but I keep up with my Carpet Store rebellion. “What’s the big deal? You don’t need my help. It’s not like we’re choosing what pieces we get or something. We get whatever’s left.”
Her purse slides off her shoulder a second before she pulls it back up. She holds it firmly there and says in a voice that’s firm too, one I know better than to argue with, “That’s the thing, Rory Dawn, we always choose what we get. Now I suggest you choose to get your goddamn shoes on and let’s go.”
We bring home another stack of carpet pieces, outdated samples and remnants too short to sell, different-colored, different-styled, different-lengthed, and different-piled, and Mama gets down to it. She cuts the squares precise, the colors blending against the mortar and brick under the woodstove, against the frame of the door, and she mumbles through the nails she holds in her lips, murmurs about this green and that yellow while she hammers them in, and never after that does she ask for my help or advice, and I don’t offer anyway, a
nd as the paydays roll past, our wall-to-wall becomes a reality.
Six pay stubs later and our living room is carpeted in the brightest blues, golds, and violets, patterned and deep. As she’s packing up her tools, Mama is all smiles and says, “See if you can pick a favorite, R.D. I bet you can’t.” I don’t think to question this until I walk across it in bare feet, sink into the plush of this square and that. I don’t think to question this until I imagine doing it myself, deciding what goes with which and making it permanent, believing in my choices enough to pound them in with a hammer.
border crossing
Mama has a red truck with an Indian name, and we drive it west through the desert and then up through the trees that separate us from Grandma’s new digs on the California side of the law. Mama only drinks her soda warm since she got the dentures that make her gums sensitive to hot and cold, and so I ride with my bare feet on the dashboard and a can of warm RC between my legs and try to get used to the idea that we are going somewhere. We cross the border that separates the State of Nevada from the State of California just about the time that the sun is fully up behind us, because she says she wanted to hit the road early, arrive early, and get a drink early, but really it’s because Grandma is “sick and needs visiting,” and that’s news to me too. Mama decided we were taking this trip last night, got down a suitcase I didn’t even know we had, told me to get to filling it with the cribbage board, a carton of cigarettes, and pop for the road, and if all of that wasn’t surprising enough, she says she wants to tell me a story about her life.