Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Read online

  To Susanna

  CONTENTS

  Sleepover

  Playhouse

  Tell Yourself

  The Greatest Show on Earth, 1982: What There Was

  My Dog Roscoe

  Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

  My Sister Is in Pain

  A Multitude of Sins

  To You, as a Woman

  Daughters of the Animal Kingdom

  Somewhere Warm

  My Bliss

  Blood Work, 1999

  Children of Transylvania, 1983

  Natural Disasters

  The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree

  Acknowledgments

  Mothers,

  Tell

  Your

  Daughters

  Sleepover

  Ed and I were making out by candlelight on the couch. Pammy was in my bedroom with Ed’s brother; she wanted to be in the dark because her face was broke out.

  “We were wishing your head could be on Pammy’s body,” Ed said. “You two together would make the perfect girl.”

  I took it as a compliment—unlike Pammy, I was flat chested. Ed kissed my mouth, my throat, my collarbone; he pressed his pelvis into mine. The full moon over the driveway reminded me of a single headlamp or a giant eyeball. Ed’s tongue was in my ear when Mom’s car lights hit the picture window. Ed slid to the floor and whistled for his brother, who crawled from the bedroom on hands and knees. They scurried out the screen door into the back yard and hopped the fence. Pammy and I fixed our clothes and hurriedly dealt a hand of Michigan rummy by candlelight.

  “You girls are going to ruin your eyes,” Mom said, switching on the table lamp. When Mom went to change her clothes, Pammy whispered that she’d let Ed’s brother go into her pants. Her hair was messed up, so I smoothed it behind her ear.

  “Too bad this show isn’t in color,” Pammy said later, when we were watching Frankenstein. While the doctor was still cobbling together body parts, Pammy fell asleep with her small pretty feet on my lap. I stayed awake, though, and saw the men from the town band together to kill the monster.

  Playhouse

  In the little courtyard of my brother’s place I close the six-foot-high gate behind me. Coming over without calling first shouldn’t be a big deal, since I usually spend half my life here. Since I was born, I’ve never gone this long—three weeks—without seeing Steve, and that’s no exaggeration. Not to be a drama queen, which I’m not, but ever since his Summer Solstice party, I’m feeling sick and weird, and twice Steve hasn’t returned my phone calls. Maybe the brats were undercooked or got left out in the sun, and that’s why I’ve been shaky. We fought at the party, and I said, Fuck you, and carried a bottle of tequila down by the pink peonies—I remember that much—but then I woke up at home. Woke up in the shower, to be precise, with cold water running over me and my boyfriend, JC, yelling. No surprise that I can’t stand for JC to touch me since that night.

  Vines with glossy leaves obscure most of the privacy fence, and the beds of gladiolas and irises have gone crazy, so they crowd the flagstone path and paint my bare legs with mustard-colored pollen. This spring, I helped Steve unload a truckload of cow manure, which caused his neighbors fits, and I can still smell it. As I come around the corner of his house, pink fobs on a flowering bush thump me and wag as if mounted on springs. On either side of the door are hanging baskets brimming with dark purple wave petunias, and the smell is too much. I lean over a fountain of yellow daylilies and throw up. I’m thinking about going back to my car and wiping my mouth—there’s a brown cloth glove on the back seat—but the security light comes on, followed by the light in the kitchen.

  “Look, it’s Janie,” Steve says to the toddler on his hip, and at the sight of him and his three-year-old daughter, my heart swells.

  “Hey, guys,” I say. “Long time no see.”

  “And your aunt Janie has orange hair. What the hell did you do to yourself?”

  “Hi, Pinky,” I say. Her real name is Patricia, but nobody calls her that. Pinky has rosy cheeks and curly hair, dark like Steve’s, like mine before I made the mistake of bleaching it. I can’t stop smiling at the sight of my brother and my niece, and I wish I’d brought the kiddo a present, a book with pictures or something glow-in-the-dark.

  “I finally decided to go to college. Clown college,” I say and follow him inside. My hair looks bad, I know—I don’t need to hear it from anybody else.

  Pinky looks cheerful, as if she’s being carried somewhere she likes going. At three she still always wants Daddy to pick her up.

  “Hey, shut the door behind you. I got the AC on,” Steve says. “Were you born in a barn?”

  “Same barn you were born in, dude.”

  His one-story house is about as big as JC’s house, where I’ve lived for two years, but Steve has a big back yard where he grills out in the summer. The lingering smell of what must’ve been brats for dinner threatens my stomach again, as does the sight of greasy paper plates in the garbage. I want to ask about food poisoning, but I don’t want to start on something negative.

  “Do you want a glass of wine?” Steve asks and puts Pinky down. “And seriously, what happened to your hair?”

  “I washed it in the Kalamazoo River,” I say and follow him into the kitchen, onto the yellow-and-white flooring that compresses under my feet—it feels weird if you’re not expecting it. Right before Pinky was born, he installed cushioning under new vinyl, so it’s more forgiving if she falls on it. He lays floors for a living, so he knows about all your specialized materials.

  I accept the white wine in a wine glass with a couple of ice cubes, hoping it’ll settle my stomach, and decline the cigarette Steve offers to roll for me. I’ve been trying to quit, though I already smoked three at work today.

  “So what’ve you been up to besides ruining your hair?” Steve asks when we settle on the couch. In front of us, almost blocking the TV and crowding the furniture, sits a big plastic playhouse. This house within a house takes up a big part of the room, looks bright and safe with its gently sloping magenta roof above yellow walls with smooth window openings. Under the window facing us are stickers depicting fruit. I hate the way the playhouse makes the room feel crowded, but I’m not going to start bitching right off.

  “I was just trying something out,” I say. JC thinks my hair is a sign of me losing my mind. I’ve promised to color it black again, but the chemicals in the hair dye were sickening the first time, and I’m not ready to smell it again.

  “Well, you stay away from Pinky’s hair,” he says, like nothing is off-kilter with us. Maybe his phone hasn’t been working, and maybe he hasn’t been ignoring my calls. The wine has a sour flavor. I prefer mixed drinks when it’s hot like this, or just a few shots. Not as many as I had at the party.

  Steve sits up suddenly, as though he’s been pricked by an electrical charge. People always say Steve and me have a lot of energy. Our dad has the same energy, too, and he uses it to tinker with the electronics that entirely fill his trailer, except for the cot he sleeps on.

  “Hey, Janie, you’ve got to help me with this playhouse. I tried to get the Bitch to do it, but she says she won’t be around me and power tools. She says I have inner rage. I told her, You used to love my inner rage, Bitch.”

  The Bitch is Pinky’s ma, who still comes over to watch Pinky sometimes, though she lost her custody rights when she was convicted of cooking meth.

  “Aren’t you going to put that thing outside?”

  “It was a hundred degrees today. My crazy kid’ll sit out there and cook herself. I’ll take it out through the slider when the temp drops.” He nods at the sliding glass door as though he and the door have made an agreement.


  “It’s my fun-fun-funhouse!” Pinky says.

  “That’s what they call the one at day care.” Steve turns to Pinky and speaks in an animated way. “It’s fun, isn’t it, your funhouse?”

  With a great show of bending her knees and swinging her arms, Pinky jumps in the air about an inch and then runs to the playhouse and opens the saloon-style doors. She disappears inside. I wonder if ever in my life I was that young or joyful.

  “Looks like it’s all plastic. Why do you need power tools?”

  “The roof came off when she pushed on it with the broom. Some kind of factory defect. I don’t need the roof falling on my kid’s head,” he says.

  Pinky comes out of the playhouse and sits beside me on the couch. I put my arm around her and worry about whether she really would let herself cook in the name of having fun. She’s lucky to have a dad who will protect her. When Steve leaves the room to get his cordless drill, I let out a breath I haven’t realized I’ve been holding. When he returns, he opens his hand to show four three-inch galvanized deck screws. His hand is shaking just like mine.

  I drain my glass and put it on the shelf behind the TV. At the party, I saw Pinky drinking out of glasses people left on the coffee table. You wouldn’t think a kid that age would like the taste of watered-down mixed drinks and stale beer and wine. When I brought it up to Steve, that’s when we got in a fight.

  “Lean on this part,” Steve says and taps the edge of the hollow roof before crawling inside on hands and knees. Seeing her daddy, over six feet tall, crouching in the playhouse makes Pinky laugh. She reaches in through the window and taps Steve on the head. He doesn’t seem to notice her touch as he fusses with the adjustment on his drill. He contorts himself into an upside-down position, and Pinky jumps away as the drill engages, covering her ears at the grinding-whining sound. He secures the roof easily while I lightly push down with my forearm. After the second screw, I move to the other side, where a sticker reads Gas, and above it there’s a gas hose—a length of shiny rope with a plastic nozzle at the end.

  On the TV is a report about the fair tax. I’ve been hearing that phrase, wondering if it really is fair, and so I lean on the roof and watch the screen, but with the drill screaming, I can’t make out what they’re saying. When it’s time for the fourth screw, Steve says, “Push down hard right here. This is where it’s not lining up right.”

  As he engages the drill, I push my forearm harder against the roof, and suddenly I feel more than pressure. Something bad is happening; there’s a screw grabbing me, going through my skin, and the drill’s scream vibrates through my arm and shoulder. When I try to pull away, I feel tearing. “Hey, Steve, dude, could you back that screw out?” I pant, my voice like a robot’s, trying to keep calm so I don’t alarm Pinky. My heart is pounding, though, and sweat bursts out over my whole body.

  “Did the screw go through the roof?”

  “Yeah. Back it out.” I push my arm hard into the plastic roof where it’s pinned, trying not to tug against the screw.

  “That fair tax is bullshit,” Steve says, suddenly angry, shaking his head at the TV, though his view of the screen is partly blocked by being inside the playhouse.

  “Yeah, could you back that screw out? Uh, right now, bro.”

  When Steve first reengages the drill, I feel a jarring, and for an instant the screw goes farther in, and maybe even hits my bone.

  “Sorry,” he says. He reverses the direction and backs it out.

  “Fuck,” I whisper and try to catch my breath. I lean against the wall and press hard on the wound to stanch any bleeding, but don’t dare look at it.

  “Shit, now it’s sticking out in here.” The drill grind-whines again. “I’m surprised it went through the roof.” He reaches outside through the window above the gas pump and runs his fingers over the roof until he feels the hole the screw made. Without my weight compressing the roof, the screw no longer sticks out the top. His arm out the window makes me think of Alice in Wonderland grown too big for a house after eating some cake. “You notice the price here on the gas pump? Only two bucks a gallon. Now there’s a happier time.”

  Steve pushes on the roof from below, assures himself it’s secure. After he gets his drill back in its case and crawls out of the little house on his knees, he notices me grimacing. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “That screw didn’t go into your arm, did it?”

  “Yeah, it did.”

  “Let me see it.”

  I clutch the arm tighter.

  “Just come over here and let me look at it,” he says and pats the couch cushion. When I sit beside him, he takes my arm and squints at the wound. “Looks like it just broke the skin.”

  “Really? You don’t think I should go to the ER?”

  “You go to the ER, you’ll be paying that bill for years. You know that, right? Does it hurt?”

  “No. But it felt weird when it happened.”

  “Looks fine to me. Look at it yourself. You think it did more than break the skin?”

  “It felt like it did.” I look. Turns out it’s not bleeding at all. The wound looks like nothing, just a red spot. His reassurance calms me, as always, more than my own thoughts do.

  “Well, I can’t drive you anywhere, that’s for sure. If I drive with Pinky after I’ve been drinking, it’s child endangerment. I’m just saying, from my eyes it looks okay.”

  “You’re probably right.” I take one more look at the red spot.

  “I just saw a news show about emergency rooms.” He’s shaking his head. “That’s probably the biggest problem with health care in this country, people using the ER as their doctor. Costs taxpayers more than an average month’s rent just to walk in the door, and that’s before any tests.” Both of us like to laugh at this world, but Steve’s able to move right from joking around into his real opinions, and then he stands by them, while I find it easier to go along so nobody has to argue.

  “I don’t really have a doctor,” I say. “Except at the women’s clinic.”

  “My new funhouse!” Pinky announces. She’s back inside, leaning out between the shutters, resting her elbows on the window ledge above the pictures of oranges, apples, and bananas, as though she is a chubby miniature shopkeeper from olden times. Clutched in one hand is a stuffed rabbit with a pink ribbon around its neck. I gave that rabbit to her for her birthday in April, and I feel ridiculously grateful that she likes it.

  “That’s cute as hell, her standing there in that window,” I say.

  Pinky waves, and we both wave back.

  “Remember our playhouse?” I ask when I settle myself on the couch again with a second glass of wine.

  “That was a great playhouse,” Steve says. “But I still don’t know how the Indians cooked inside their teepees without smoking themselves out.”

  The summer when he was fourteen and I was eleven we slept out there so we could smoke cigarettes and pot. In October, though, we tried keeping a campfire going inside and burned the thing down. There was an older neighbor, a friend of Steve’s, a pot dealer, who used to hang out with us. Once when Steve wasn’t there, the guy climbed on top of me and pinned me on the old rug. He was wearing shorts, so I was able to reach under and pinch his balls, and I kept squeezing until he howled and let go. It sounds like nothing now, but I was freaked out and shaky for days, and after that I never went into the playhouse without Steve. Steve thought it was hilarious, my pinching the guy’s balls, and a few months later, after the guy stopped coming around, I, too, could see how it seemed kind of funny.

  Pinky waves out the playhouse window again, and the motion makes me feel tearful for no reason, so I ask my brother about the fair tax. He’s always kept up on politics and likes to rail against the conservatives. I’m pretty sure I feel the same way, but I’m no good at explaining why, especially to JC, who hates Democrats and Republicans alike.

  “Oh, it’s some Republican bullshit sales tax,” Steve says. “If it’s up to those fuckers, we got no taxes and no labor laws,
no unions, no EPA. You know, I have to think about that environmental shit now, with Pinky in the picture.” He’s agitated, but when he looks back at the playhouse and waves at Pinky, his agitation falls away.

  “She’s got more hair than when I saw her three weeks ago,” I say. “That curly black hair is really something.”

  “Strangers go crazy over it,” Steve says. He has one ankle up over the other knee and he’s flexing his foot against his carpeted floor. “People tell me at the grocery store how pretty her hair is, and at the doctor’s office. And it’s hard work brushing a head of hair like that. And I had to learn how barrettes work. I’m learning how to fucking braid. That’s not the kind of shit a guy just knows.” He stops drumming his fingers and lights a cigarette. When he offers it to me, I accept, and he rolls and lights another for himself. He keeps the window behind him cracked open, but blue smoke still hangs in the air. Steve’s wavy black hair is thinning, though he’s only twenty-six—could that have happened in three weeks?

  “How’s things at the Smart Mart?” he asks.

  “Sucks dead donkey dicks, same as usual. This guy comes in this morning with a fucking sweat sock full of pennies, and they’re nasty. He’s counting out three dollars on the counter, and there’s a line behind him, so I make this cardboard sign: No sweaty pennies. Right then Matt comes in and throws the sign at me and tells me I’ve got to clean the bathroom before I leave.”

  “Well, get your damned GED and get a better job.”

  When Steve says that, my arm aches a little more. I finish my wine and go into the bathroom to look at it in the mirror. The wound is still just a red spot, now stuck with fuzz from the couch. Maybe there’s some swelling. I pee, flush, and come out, thinking I’ll ask Steve to take a closer look.

  When I get back, Pinky is leaning against the coffee table, holding my wine glass, looking like a tiny, chubby barfly. As she lifts the glass toward her lips, I grab her hand and peel off her fingers.

  “Thanks for coming over,” Steve says, and his eyes are watering like he’s about to cry. His forehead wrinkles. “I’ve been wanting to tell you I’m sorry about what I said at the party, calling you a dumb cunt. I know you hate that word.” He watches Pinky open the saloon doors and shut them carefully behind her. “I guess I was too high, and the Bitch was here, and we were fighting, and I was on those antidepressants that fucked me up,” Steve says. “You’ll be glad to know I got off those.”