Towelhead (2 page)

Then, a week later, Barry broke down and told her the truth. That he had shaved me himself. That he had been shaving me for weeks. That he couldn't seem to stop shaving me. He said the whole thing was his fault, but my mother blamed me. She said if I hadn't always been talking about my pubic hair, this would never have happened. She said that when Barry had first offered to shave me, I should've said no. She said there were right and wrong ways to act around men, and for me to learn which was which, I should probably go and live with one.

Finally Daddy forced me to go swimming. I figured he would probably like all my pubic hair, since it made me look ugly. But then, when we got to the pool and I took my shorts off, he said, “This bathing suit doesn't even cover you.”

“Yes, it does,” I said, looking down at the low-cut legs.

“No, it doesn't,” he said. “You're falling out of it. Put your shorts back on immediately.”

I put my shorts back on and sat on my towel, watching Daddy swim laps back and forth in the single lane that had been roped off for adults. Once, a little kid got confused and drifted under the lane divider, and Daddy had to stop in midstroke. I thought he would probably yell at the kid, but he just smiled and waited for him to get out of the way. I saw then that everything would be fine between me and Daddy if only we were strangers.

 

School started, and a lot of the janitors, who were Mexican, talked to me in Spanish. I couldn't really understand them, but I signed up for Spanish class so I could learn. Then Daddy made me change to French, since that was the only other language his family back in Lebanon spoke, and maybe one day I would get to meet them. I didn't talk very much in any of my classes, except when the teachers called on me. When the other kids heard my accent, they asked where I was from, and I said New York. They said, “New York City?,” and since they were kind of excited about that, I said yes.

I got a job babysitting Zack Vuoso after school. Mrs. Vuoso worked in the billing department of a doctor's office, and Mr. Vuoso ran his own copy store at the local shopping center. He came home at a little after six, and she came home later, around seven. They called the couple of hours I spent with Zack each afternoon “keeping him company.”

It made Zack pretty mad to have a babysitter. He was always pointing out that I was only three years older than he was, and also, when we played together on the weekends, his parents didn't pay me anything. “That's because they're home on the weekends,” I said, but he was still insulted.

To make it seem like he wasn't being babysat, he had an idea one day to go and visit his father at work. I didn't want to, but Zack just started walking, so I followed him. I thought for sure Mr. Vuoso would fire me on the spot for not doing my job, but he seemed happy to see us. “Just in time,” he said, and he put us to work in the back room, collating packets about how to knit a Christmas stocking.

After a while, Zack got bored and starting xeroxing different parts of his body. He stuck his face under the lid, then a hand, then a hand flipping the bird. “Maybe you shouldn't do that,” I said, watching this, and he pulled his pants down and xeroxed his butt. Then he brought all the copies over and started collating them with the knitting packet. When Mr. Vuoso came back to check on us, he asked what was the meaning of all of this. I said I was sorry, and Mr. Vuoso said, “Did you make these pictures?” I shook my head, and he said, “Then you have nothing to be sorry about.” He told Zack that he could go ahead and redo all the packets from scratch by himself, and that we would be up front waiting for him when he was done.

I didn't know what to say to Mr. Vuoso at the front of the store. Sometimes a customer came in and I didn't have to say anything; other times I just sat there on the stool he'd given me, trying not to be so quiet. I knew from Daddy that it was bad to be quiet. Except other times, when I talked, he didn't like that either. The worst thing about him was that his rules were always changing.

Finally I said to Mr. Vuoso, “I'm sorry I'm so quiet.”

He laughed. He'd just taken an order for a thousand business cards, and was finishing up the paperwork. “I'll tell you what,” he said. “There's nothing worse than talk for the sake of talk.”

I nodded, then relaxed a little. It was nice to watch Mr. Vuoso do his job. He didn't seem to notice that I was there, and I was glad. I was tired of being noticed.

When Zack finally finished up his packets, we closed the store and rode home in the Vuosos' minivan. Mr. Vuoso told me to sit up front, even though Zack had called shotgun, and when he started kicking the back of my seat, his father told him to cut the shit. For a joke, Mr. Vuoso pulled into my driveway and dropped me off, even though we lived next door to each other. He said, “Zack and I are going to have a talk tonight about authority. I think you'll find that tomorrow will be a better day.” Then he leaned over and opened my door for me.

The next day, Zack only seemed angrier. We played badminton, and he kept hitting me in the boobs. When I told him I was quitting, he called me a towelhead and stormed in the house. I went inside to find him, but he wasn't in the living room. “Zack!” I called, but he didn't answer. I went upstairs then and found him in the guest room, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at a
Playboy
.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Leave me alone,” he said, without looking up.

The closet door was open and I saw a whole stack of magazines in there. Some of Mr. Vuoso's army uniforms hung from the rod above. “C'mon, Zack,” I said. “Put that away.”

“Why?” he said. “I want to look at it.”

“You're too young.”

“Don't you want to look at it?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then you can go downstairs,” he said. “You can go watch TV.”

I went downstairs and turned the TV on, but I couldn't find a show I liked, so I went back up to the guest room. “Okay,” I said to Zack, “put it away.”

“Look at this,” he said, and he held up a picture of a woman who was riding a horse naked.

“That's stupid,” I said.

He shrugged and went back to flipping through the pages. After a moment, I walked over to the closet and got my own magazine. I took it back to a wicker chair with me and opened it up to the beginning. There was already a woman without a shirt on in the Table of Contents. I closed the magazine again, then opened it back up to the middle, where the centerfold was. I didn't unfold it, but I looked at the pictures on the pages before and after it. The woman had a funny haircut between her legs. A thin strip that ran up the middle, like a Mohawk. She was wearing clothes, but they were pushed aside so you could see her private parts. There was some writing next to the pictures, different opinions that the woman had about men and dating and food that she liked. Then there was the name of the man who had taken the pictures. When I saw this, I closed the magazine again and put it back in the closet. I went downstairs and sat in the living room. Soon Zack came down, too.

“Did you put everything back the way it was?” I asked him.

He nodded, then lay down on the couch.

“You can't look at the magazines anymore,” I told him.

“I can do whatever I want, towelhead.”

“Stop calling me that,” I said.

“Why?” he said. “You're a towelhead, aren't you?”

“No,” I said, even though I didn't know what a towelhead was.

“Your dad is,” he said. “If your dad is, then so are you.”

I got it then, only it seemed stupid, since Daddy didn't wear a towel on his head. He was a Christian, just like everyone else in Texas. One summer, when I was seven, he'd taken me to the Arab church and had me baptized in a bathtub. I'd cried for days beforehand, scared that I would have to be naked in front of a bunch of people I didn't know, but the priest gave me a robe to wear. In the car on the way home, Daddy made fun of me for worrying about nothing, and I knew then that he'd known about the robe all along.

Zack fell asleep on the couch, and I went back upstairs to make sure there weren't any
Playboy
s lying around. I was disappointed when there weren't, so I went to the closet and took one out. I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened it up to the centerfold, this time unfolding it. I was starting to get used to the pictures a little. They didn't shock me as much as they had earlier. I especially liked the ones where the women had hardly any pubic hair. If I squeezed my legs together when I looked at them, I got a good feeling.

Mr. Vuoso came home and asked if I'd had any problems with Zack, and I told him no. “That's what I like to hear,” he said, reaching for his wallet. I thought I might feel more nervous around him now that I knew what kind of magazines he read, but I didn't. Instead, I felt more comfortable. I felt like he didn't think there was anything wrong with breasts or bodies at all.

 

When I got home, there was blood in my underwear. At least I thought it was blood. It was kind of orange and rusty. I got on the phone and described it to my mother, and she said, “That's definitely blood.”

“What do I do?” I said. It was the one thing I'd been most afraid of, getting my first period with Daddy. The night before I'd left Syracuse, my mother had given me a couple of her pads, but they weren't going to last.

“What do you mean, what do you do? Just put on a pad and tell Daddy when he gets home. He knows what a period is.”

“Can't you tell him?”

“Why would I tell him?”

“I just don't want to talk to him about it.”

“Why not? You're going to have to talk about it sometime.”

“You don't understand,” I said. “Daddy doesn't like my body.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I don't know.”

“You're making a big deal out of nothing,” she said. “Pull yourself together.”

We hung up, and I went to my bathroom and put on one of the pads. As I walked around the house, I kept thinking I could hear it making little crinkling noises in my underpants. They'd shown us a movie in school saying that this was a special day, but mostly I just felt like a baby in a diaper.

When Daddy pulled into the driveway at seven o'clock, I met him at the back door. “Hi,” I said.

“Hello, Jasira,” he mumbled. Daddy was rarely happy at the end of the day. The people at NASA bothered him since they didn't work as hard as he did. It was best to stay out of his way and let him cook dinner by himself, only I was worried about my pad supply.

“Daddy,” I said, as he set down his briefcase, “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Not now,” he said, untying his shoes. Then he headed for the kitchen and got a beer from the fridge.

I went in the bathroom to check my pad, which was beginning to fill up. Plus, my stomach hurt. Not my real stomach, but the part below it. It felt like someone was reaching a hand inside of me and squeezing something they shouldn't. I went back out in the kitchen and said, “Daddy?”

He was unwrapping a piece of steak and listening to a small radio on the counter. He probably heard me, even though he didn't say anything. I stood there for a while, waiting for his news report to end, then said, “Daddy?” again.

He sighed. “What is it, Jasira?”

“I have to talk to you about something.”

“Just say it, would you?” he said. “I don't need all the introductions.”

“Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I got my period.”

“Your period?” he said. Finally he looked at me. “You're too young to get your period.”

“I'm thirteen,” I said.

He shook his head. “My God.”

“I called Mom. She said to tell you.”

“Well,” he said, “what do you need? Do you need to go to the store?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“I think so.”

He took off his apron and went to put his shoes back on. In the car, he said, “You can't wear tampons until you're married. Do you understand what I'm telling you?”

I nodded, even though I wasn't sure I did.

“Tampons are for married ladies,” he said.

We passed the pool, which stayed lit from underwater at night. It always seemed sad to me that it was closed when it looked the prettiest.

I had hoped that he would give me money at the drugstore and let me go in by myself, but he turned the car off and got out. In the feminine hygiene aisle, he said, “Let's see,” and started pulling down all different kinds of pads. Finally he turned to me and said, “Would you describe your situation as light, medium, or heavy?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“What do you mean, you don't know?”

“Can't I pick them out, Daddy?”

“Why?” he said. “What's the problem?”