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by John
Ennis Talking about it now, I remember wanting to vomit. How could they not have known how messed up it was? If my old man had been around there would have been hell to pay, but I had watched him pass out on my bed. Based on past experience it would have been an hour or two before he came back around. He had left my Mom and Grandma to drink and talk between themselves in the living room. He stopped in the bedroom as I was placing my goldfish back in the tank I’d just cleaned. The gravel looked new, bright, and the filter was a study in contrast—a tuft of sheer-white angel hair atop the charcoal chamber filled with little black chunks. The air filter bubbled up in the tank, sounding like a brook in the far corner of the room. It had often lulled me to sleep, but it was beer that took my father down that day. His jaw gaped open and he made some kind of gurgling sound. I left him there to join the others in the living room. My mom drank high-balls. Nanny, her mother, sat with a beer in her hand. “Oh, just look at him,” she said. I scrunched my lips in a kind of smile, eyes turned down. “How handsome he is,” she went on, tilting her head and smiling. Her lips were smudged with red paint. “C’mere. Let me see you.” I strained, twisting against her grip as she slid a finger under my chin, then ran her hand through my hair. “Look at those curls,” she said, her hand lingering there. “I know,” my Mom returned, “Don’t it make you wonder? Any girl would kill for a head of hair like that.” “Oh, I think he would make a pretty girl,” my Grandmother replied. I wriggled out of her arms and half-winced, half-smiled, in an effort to placate the two of them, hoping to escape to my friend Tim’s house. “I’m gonna start dinner in a little while,” my Mom replied when I asked if I could go. Tim lived around the corner. His father had left his mother. He’d run off with Mrs. Raney whose five boys still lived with their father in the house across the street. Nobody ever really talked about how shitty or strange it was that friends, family, could collaborate against us in such betrayals. I wondered how it was that Tim liked his father more than his Mom, even though she was not very likeable. I never brought it up. We were best friends.We could talk. Sometimes we’d talk about how our parents sucked, but more often we’d talk about girls and fighting and about how when we were old enough we would get on our motorcycles and head west. He loved his dog. “You know, I think you’re right,” my Mom said to Grandma. They both looked at me. “He would make a very pretty girl. C’mere you,” she said playfully, reaching into the sewing basket alongside her chair. Before I knew what had happened she had fixed a red satin ribbon in my hair, and, while a part of me enjoyed being fussed over, a deeper sense informed my gut that this was out of the ordinary. My Mom stirred her high-ball with her finger and sucked on it while my Grandmother raved. Is that unbelievable? I knew he was handsome, but he makes an even prettier girl.” My Mom got up and when she returned she had some of my sister’s clothes with her. There was a frilly pink chiffon dress with ties hanging from the waist, and black patent leather shoes with buckles. A growing sense of discomfort came over me as they primped and preened my hair, giggling like a couple of schoolgirls. “Oh, stop,” they both insisted, “don’t be so silly. It’s just a game!” When they pressed me to go in the other room and put on the dress, I put my foot down. I would not.All I could think of were the boys and girls at school. I was aware of a competitiveness. A boy could never lose to a girl, at anything—he’d be marked for life. This was a far worse predicament than that. That being so, rage began to churn inside of me. I alternated between ranting and begging, between attack and compliance. It dawned on me that despite having expressed my deepest disdain, my feelings were irrelevant. I succumbed. I dressed the way they wanted and stood there until they had their fun. I must have looked absurd dressed in pink frills and white anklets, in some way still a defiant soldier before his captors. When they tried to put lipstick on me something snapped. I pushed Nanny’s arms away, jumping back. I kicked one leg and a shoe flew across the room, slamming against the china cabinet. Tears broke free as I kicked off the other which landed with a patent leather clacking. The sense of confinement against which I struggled was crushing. I’d had all I was about to stand for, and that sense surged through my body. “Fine,” my mother said. “Be that way.” The huge crash from the back of the house suspended the immediate crisis and filled a dire moment with more anxious dismay. My mother said nothing, running out of the room. In an instant I dropped the hem of the dress I was to have momentarily stripped away. Nanny and I looked at each other and my tears of anger turned to a more sheepish veneer, evoking something in her. Without a word, the two of us immediately followed Mom. Once down the hall, in my room, my mother sighed. My father leaned against the wall. Nanny stopped in the doorway and I stepped forward. Still drunk and having lost his balance, Dad was trying to straighten himself. He pressed his arms against the wall and disengaged his hips from the metal stand which had housed my fish tank, now floored in shattered ruins, the sharp glass shards unframed, gravel scattered. My father stopped for a moment, easing back against the wall, attempting to focus his eyes on me. I could not look at him. Six plump, yellow-gold and suffocating goldfish sucked futility through their frantic gills. Their bodies slapped the floor in shallow pools. Their lips were filled with instinct, their bulging eyes looked as if they were being chased. The air was filled with it, and all of us stood, sucking hard—shame, and all of us shameful. “What in the world?” my father stammered. I stood, red cheeked, before him in pink chiffon and white anklets soaked through to the skin of my fat little feet. I had torn the ribbon from my hair. He looked at my mother, amazed at what lay before him. My lungs tightened at how little I could save. Nanny did not try to stop me when I dashed past her. I raced as quickly as I could back down the hall. I turned the lock without effort and exited the house. I flew along past the Raney’s. Bill and James were sitting on the front stairs. I did not record their reactions as I ran past. I’m not sure they noticed. Their own myopic shame, boys abandoned by a mother, may have blinded them to mine—I cannot say. But, they never said a word to me about it. I pushed open the front door to Tim’s house, my chest heaving as I made my way across the cluttered porch to the storm door of the mudroom. I stopped. I banged. I pushed the door open. Tim was standing there when I stepped in. He looked once, and not more than that. “Hey,” he said. “Hey,” I shot back. “Guess what,” he said. “I’m gonna go live with my Dad.” And there I stood, a boy diminished and restored, between the vagaries of birth and time, like Tim, like Mr. Raney and his boys. My breath had eased, and my body cooled beneath the pink chiffon now darkened with sweat. I changed into a pair of Tim’s jeans. I went barefoot. We made a fire in the yard out back, toasted marshmallows, laughed and ate, sitting beside flames fueled by my sister’s pink dress.
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F I C T I O N Disappearances The
Story of Stupid Girl Hold
Steady the Raft Cold
Milk Scenes
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Beast Twine Home |
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