The Geography of Girlhood (8 page)

or me without my underwear,

and you’d have typical Bobby:

his left hand resting on the flanks,

his right not pausing until

it was inside the body,

until it had found for certain

the meaning of tender.

Tonight, my dad calls me outside.

At first I think he’s found out

where I was last night

or what I did,

but all he wants to say is that

tonight there’s a meteor shower,

big bath of stars

that comes once a century.

I knock out a laugh of relief

and we stand under the night sky

which seems to be falling to pieces all around us.

He pulls me close and says
my little girl

and for a moment

it’s as if he knows

that I’m not anymore.

I am flunking out of French

and it’s not all
ooh la la

and
oui, oui, oui
,

it’s pretty much all

oh merde
and
au revoir
.

Here’s what I want to know:

how am I supposed

to speak a foreign tongue

when I’ve never even seen

another state?

How am I supposed to know

about everywhere else

when I can barely even

navigate my way

around here?

For all her noise about how she hates it here,

next year my sister is going to a college

only two hours away.

She just got accepted today

so now she has her life mapped out

so now she is a good girl

leaving the rest of us

to go bad.

Winter is upon us

and ice is everywhere,

especially in our living room

where my dad and Susan sit

barely speaking.

Something has happened between them

and I don’t know what it is

but I can tell already

it won’t melt away.

Seasons come and seasons go

and I’m going to have to say goodbye

to another one.

Sometimes I imagine I’m talking to my mother

and when we’ve exhausted

the secrets of other girls,

I tell her the gossip of my own life:

how Tara gave Bobby to me

without even knowing it,

how Jenny Arnold barely talks to me anymore,

how there’s talk of putting Denise in an institution

how I think I love Bobby but maybe

it’s just that I can’t seem to stop thinking

about Randall Faber’s final day in the rain.

I imagine I’m talking to my mother

and somehow it’s making it all better

because she’s holding my hand

as we sit together on the sofa,

the dogs panting at our feet

and some sweet thing

burning in the oven.

I wake up in the middle of the night

to the sound of someone crying.

I go into Spencer’s room

and even though he’s fourteen

and almost grown up

I find him curled like a kitten

in a ball at the end of his bed

all soft and sweet and young.

I ask him what’s wrong

and he says our parents don’t like each other anymore.

How do you know?
I say and he says,

Because your dad ate a steak for dinner

and he didn’t even care that it made her cry.

I try to tell him this is the way love goes,

it is fluid like tides or weather,

just when it seems like it’s going away,

it comes back

and even if it doesn’t, that’s okay.

Finally he looks at me and says

Is that the way it is with us?

and I tell him he’s an idiot and a goofball

and I will always be his stepsister

and I will always love him

and because it’s the only way I know

I bring him my globe

and say
If you ever need me

I’ll always be somewhere on this

and I stroke his hair

until he sleeps again.

Two days before Denise burns her house down,

I have a dream I’m hovering above the town.

I see patches of snow on the land,

I see our house and Denise just outside it

one hand on her lighter,

one foot out the door.

I see my father,

knee-deep in the sand

of his half-finished garage

and my stepmother,

fleeing the kitchen,

crackers growing stale in the cupboards,

the cheese molding into hard curls

like my hair in seventh grade.

I see my father and Susan collide in the hallway,

wrap around each other like vines.

From up above the land

I see them crawl and cycle

towards the bedroom,

Susan’s cheeks as red

as the ointment

she once slathered

on my stepbrother’s scraped knee.

They duck under a beam

and they are lost to me.

I am left hovering up above

my own house,

bits of hunger falling

out of my hands,

spinning to the ground and

landing like ash on the snow.

Like my mother,

I want to stand still

so I can run fast.

Like my sister,

I want to get smart

so I can fail tests.

I want to plant flowers

so I can pull weeds.

I want to make friends

so I can have enemies

I want to fall in love

so I can break hearts.

I want to learn stick shift

so I can drive away from here.

I want to learn to put things on paper

just so I can watch them burn.

I want to grow up

so I can forget this.

6

After they take Denise away

to the hospital

and say it isn’t as bad

as it sounds,

I call Bobby.

Come and get me
, I say,

and take me away from here
,

take me as far away

as you can imagine

going.

I may think I’m a badass

but before I leave,

I tape a note to the fridge.

(
Be home soon. Love, Penny
)

As the road ticks by beneath

our secondhand tires,

I berate myself:

How can I be expected

to go somewhere real

and do something great and

be someone wonderful

if I’m still the kind of goody-goody

who leaves a note?

I wake up and we’re on a highway

one and a half states away

from everyone I’ve ever known.

Bobby makes a joke about

how maybe we should

rob a Quickie Mart for fun.

I don’t answer, instead I think how

I feel farther off the map of my life

than I’ve ever felt.

But wherever I am,

I surely must be closer to my mother,

at least that’s what I tell myself.

I was the darling girl with chapped lips,

the one wearing her mother’s shoes,

savvy with drink.

I was holding Bobby’s hand

when his compass needle slid towards Kentucky

like a thief in a dank-water town,

the bluegrass, the racetrack

too bright now for him to ignore.

I’ve always loved Bobby despite my sister or myself,

despite the smell of garbage around his house

or the bad habits he can’t help bringing to bear.

And now Kentucky is like a hand up my skirt,

I can’t move towards it or away from it,

I can’t say no to Bobby and

his big fist of plans,

so he hitches me in and locks the door tight,

he knows we’ll drive until the tip

of Kentucky is three fingers inside me,

he knows that when we cross the state line

Kentucky will have stunned me and won me.

I’ll roll my head back against the seat

and moan, the memory of my own hometown

barely even matching

the sweat around my knees.

Bobby is peeing

and I am looking at the cars fly by,

picturing myself hitching a ride

from a trucker

or better yet,

the Perfect Family.

They could take me in

and love me

like I was their own

until one day

I’m grown and wise and tall

and famous for saying smart things

and then I could go back

to my hometown

and all the people I loved

would be there

alive and bright and well

all the stars lined up

in exact constellations

the way they were made to be.

We stop at a roadside bar in Arizona

because Bobby is the only person in the world

who has gotten lost trying to find the Grand Canyon

but once we’re inside,

he forgets about asking directions

and immediately he drinks too much

and talks too much

and the bartender pulls me aside

and asks me if my parents know where I am.

I realize I am on my way to becoming

just another teenage runaway statistic

and I am with a boy who thinks

playing twenty U2 songs in a row on the jukebox

makes him cool.

If Jenny were here

she’d say what would
really
be cool

is to play Merle Haggard

like the locals do.

But I’m not with Jenny, I am with a boy

who is making an ass of himself

and I’m wondering why being here

doesn’t feel like

I ever dreamed it would.

Watching Bobby, I realize

the thing about a guy you’ve

spent your whole life loving from afar

is that even though he’s real

you’ve really made most of him up.

That’s probably why I hate
Sleepless in Seattle.

My stepmom thinks it’s romantic

but what she doesn’t realize

is that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks

have done so much fantasizing about each
other

that if they were in the real world,

getting together would

definitely be a disappointment.

What if you were imagining Tom Cruise

and you got Tom Hanks?

Or what if you were imagining Tom Hanks

and you got Tom Arnold?

Say what you like, but here now,

looking across the room at the boy

I thought I so-called loved,

I am living proof that

a good imagination may be

the best friend of loners

but it is definitely

the enemy of lovers.

Sitting on a gin-soaked stool,

watching the locals drink themselves silly

I wonder if my mother ever felt the way I do:

so proud of herself for getting away

that she couldn’t understand

why all she thought about

was going back.

As the eighteenth U2 song plays

(we’ve heard this one twice now),

Bobby sidles up to me

and slurs,
How about robbing that Quickie Mart?

I stare at him.
You’re joking.

C’mon, Penny.
He gives me a drunk smirk.

Your sister would do it.

Head bowed, I’m on my knees

in front of what feels like thousands.