The Geography of Girlhood (9 page)

I’m being arrested for driving the getaway car,

I’m telling my story a mile a minute.

When I finally stand up and

crawl into the cab of the waiting cop car,

pieces of gravel cling to my kneecaps.

I’m not nose-job beautiful

but attractive enough to know

people are looking my way;

I’m no brain surgeon but I know enough

to point the finger at Bobby,

whose idea of dinner is a pint of peach schnapps,

whose mouth had been wooing my collarbone

all night, urgent as bees to a begonia.

Bobby’s the one with the bright idea

of robbing the Quick Western Grocery,

Bobby’s the guy who got us to where we are now,

some faraway county’s tin can police station.

My fingertips are touched with black,

I make my mark on a white card

and on the forearm of Officer Ron,

who I touch long enough to say,

Can’t we talk?

When he says no, there are traces of black

along my cheeks and neck,

places my fingers don’t remember touching.

I sit there and try to imagine myself miles away

from where the whole stink started,

my knees so tired from kneeling

that I forget the time when all they were good for

was casually holding me upright

and always pointing out the place

my skirt should never touch.

C’mon, Penny. Snap out of it. Whadya say?

My little imaginary Robbing-The-Quickie-Mart fantasy is

over and Bobby’s still standing right where I left him,

smirking away.
You know your sister would do it.

I’m not my sister
, I say. I look at him standing there,

and then I speak three words I never in my life thought

I’d utter to Bobby Lanegan:
Take me home.

Huh?
He stares at me.

Right now.

He burps.
What’s gotten into you?

Some sense
, I say and turn and walk to the door.

When it opens, the light hits me in the face,

giving me a little slap like the ones

you sometimes see a mean mom giving her kid,

a little slap that says some dark red dreams

are meant not to sleep in for long

and now is the time

to wake out of this one.

7

Bobby doesn’t say much on the drive home

which is okay.

I can tell by the look on his face

he knows like I do

that our love, if you could even call it that,

wasn’t meant to live long,

it had a short lifespan from the start

the way certain things do

that are born one season

and are dead by the next.

Premature and underweight, our love was born in
winter.

Once it was born, it grew up fast.

It was crawling one day and walking the next,

sucking a tit during breakfast, getting teeth by
lunchtime.

Pretty soon, it started sneaking out at night.

The police would find it lying in someone’s yard,

staring up at the stars.

One day we left it with a sitter

and when we got home, the sitter was gone

and our love was in the living room,

calling all its friends.

The next day we took it to the doctor,

who said it had a disease.

It couldn’t live in a regular house,

it could never have a normal life.

Our love, he said, wouldn’t last the winter.

It is spring now and our love has been laid to rest.

Even though I’m advised against it

I can’t help thinking about its short little life—

how its first word was
you
and its last was
me
,

how it would come home drunk after a dance,

how it learned to swim in only an afternoon,

how the two of us stood at the edge

of the community pool, cheering it on,

amazed that such a clumsy creature

could even begin to float.

When we get to the ferry,

I call my father.

He doesn’t say much,

just that he’ll pick me up

at the ferry dock

and if he sees Bobby anywhere near me,

he’ll shoot him,

he swears to God,

he will.

This is the thing about boats.

You meet people out there

on the water

that you never normally would

on land.

People on boats

are usually

swimming between one place

and another,

the past or the future,

this body of land

or that one.

Being at sea

is being somewhere

in the middle of things.

Being at sea

is being everywhere

and nowhere

all at once.

I was on my way back home when I met Marlene.

She turned to me on the ferry boat,

a stranger of foreign proportions,

somebody’s out-of-town guest.

Isn’t it beautiful here?
she said.

I’d had so much beauty in my life

I was practically hungover from it.

The sea, looking like lava and spittle,

careened out behind us.

Marlene went on to say she was recovering

from lowa and alcoholism,

and I noted that she was too doped-up on salt water

to think straight.

I could get used to a place like this
,

she said, and I told her how it was:

the deer you kill just driving into town,

the rain that ruins your birthday parties,

the mothers who become your ex-mothers

almost immediately after you can walk.

Marlene didn’t seem to care;

she wore a charmed smile,

a dubious track record,

and she was high on the promise of the place.

Look out there
, she said,

grabbing one of my tired arms

and spinning me west.

With my pupils smaller

than they had been in months,

she pointed out

that the sea, on this summer day,

was a blanket of light

and that she, Marlene, was ready

to have her days filled with light like that.

I stood beside her,

a little changed and unchanged,

barely even caring that my cheeks were getting burned,

that my hair was tangling itself beyond extraction

into hers.

I leap rivers and mountains,

I float across the platter of night

to reach my house, the other state

still fresh on my hands.

I’ve only been gone four days

but when I arrive, my father hugs me hard

and my sister tells me I’m a jerk

and my stepmother is gasping like a fish,

from panic and maybe liquor, and I am

back in the pocket,

sixteen and still my father’s girl,

the sweet hard star of his hand

upon mine, the wide planks of sky

filling my eye.

By the time I get home, I’ve been grounded for two

months and my sister has already found out where I’ve

been and with whom.

I could have warned you about him, but you wouldn’t

have listened to me anyway
, she says.

Yes, I would have
, I say, not sure if I mean it.

Are you kidding? You’re too busy being
you
to ever

listen to
me.

I stare at her.

How could she not know that all I ever wanted was to

listen to her stupid warnings? How could she not know

that I was desperate for every tall tale she had to tell?

How come families are full of people that have no clue

how they make each other feel?

I called Jenny today

and told her I miss her.

She said,
It’s about time, you big lame-ass

and then made me promise

that the second

I’m un-grounded,

we’re going record shopping.

As for my stepbrother,

he hasn’t said one word to me

since I got home.

Last night I sat down next to Spencer

and watched an entire episode

of
Star Trek
with him

and when it was over,

I said,
That was good

and he got up and left the room

like I wasn’t ever even there.

So tonight, after I found my globe

sitting on my bed

with a note from him that said,

I don’t want this anymore
,

I went to the kitchen and

made him our favorite food

and went into his room

handed him seven tacos on a plate

and walked out.

All I can think

is that if he doesn’t want me back now,

he never will.

The stars are out in full bloom tonight,

so while everyone sleeps,

I bring my dad’s telescope out of the garage

and point it up to the sky.

What they don’t tell you about telescopes, though,

is that they make your eyes hurt

from the squint and the strain

and that no matter how much you adjust and focus,

it’s still hard to see the stars

you came out there to see.

Maybe telescopes weren’t made to bring you closer

to what’s up there, after all.

Maybe telescopes were made to help you realize

that the stars will always be far away

and maybe that’s part

of what makes them so beautiful.

When I get up the next morning,

Susan has mock-scrambled-eggs

and Fakin’ Bacon waiting for me

and she says she got Dad to agree

I could go see Denise.

Then she tells me that

she ran away once

when she was a girl,

but it was for three weeks

not just three days.

It’s funny—I never imagined

my stepmother as a “girl” before,

only as the lady

who moved into my house

without asking,

but I guess everyone’s

got another version of themselves

living inside them,

you just don’t get to see it

all the time.

Susan drops me off at the visitor’s center

and tells me she’ll be back in half an hour.

It’s weird but I kind of want her to stay

because I have no idea what my best friend

is going to be like or act like

but then after a few minutes

out walks Denise.

I can’t say she looks great

but she doesn’t look awful,

she’s just not a whole lot

like the girl I grew up with,

but then again, she’d bagged and buried

that version of herself

a long time ago.

As she walks towards me,

I realize maybe sometimes things aren’t meant

to go back to what they were before,

and as Denise hugs me hello,

it’s a new thing and an old one

and that’s just how it is

and it’s good.

After we get home, I stand out in the yard

watching the rain bear down on our hometown.

I imagine you not in the hospital but instead

in Mexico, climbing the pyramids

and living to tell about it.

I imagine your sunburn is deepening, its pink landscape

spreading across your arms and shoulders.

You are taking to the pyramids on all fours,