Mothers, Tell Your Daughters Read online

The assistant’s eyes smile behind her mask. She’s about my age, twenty-three, with hair the honey color I tried to get out of a box. A job like hers helping people would be nice, though my tendency to make light of a situation might not go over well here. I’d like to work in a clean place like this instead of behind the cluttered, greasy counter at Smart Mart. Since the party, whenever I see kids grabbing at candy and gum, I’m thinking of Pinky’s chubby hands on the wine glasses and beer cups.

  “It’s part of a funhouse,” I say.

  “Funhouse?” the assistant asks.

  “It’s a little girl’s playhouse, but she calls it her funhouse. It’s what my brother and I were working on.” I suddenly fear the doctor might blame Steve. I want to say, Whatever happened is my own fault. He didn’t know I had my arm right over where the screw was.

  “Funhouse,” the doctor says, still holding the plastic corkscrew, and the way he says it makes me laugh. Who wouldn’t laugh when a man has pulled a tiny bloody party favor out of her arm?

  “You think there’s anything else in there?” he asks. At first he is serious, but then he laughs in response to my continuing laughter.

  “It’s hard to know,” I say. I admire how all the cabinets and drawers in this room are labeled by their contents: Sponges and Bandages, Face Masks, Swab Sticks, Specimen Jars, Drapes and Covers. I like being in a place where a person can always know what’s inside from the outside.

  “This could have caused infection,” the doctor announces, “but we have nipped its bud.”

  I wipe tears out of my eyes. I thought I was laughing, but now I’m crying and choking. I’m imagining Pinky as a teenager. She’ll have long legs like her ma and wild curly hair like her dad. She’ll sneak out her bedroom window on summer nights the way any girl would, but she won’t have a brother to look after her—she’ll be all alone. I don’t know how anyone can stop a girl from drinking so much she doesn’t know what she’s doing, what’s happening to her. All the precautions in the world might not be enough for a girl who loves fun. For starters, I should’ve rinsed out my wine glass and put it in the sink before I left Steve’s.

  “Jodie will clean you up,” the doctor says and disappears through the curtain. The assistant unwraps and exposes the rest of my arm. She tears open a paper wrapper and is about to apply a special bandage to close the wound, but she pauses.

  “Is this hurting you?” she asks. “You’re holding your breath.”

  What’s done is done, I think, but she’s asking as though she really wants to know. I feel myself about to spill over, but telling won’t make it better, and it will open up a whole can of worms, so I take a deep breath and concentrate on not vomiting. When I think of Pinky safe in her bed in her room with the pink rabbit night-light, smelling of baby powder, surrounded by stuffed animals, I can finally exhale. She’s okay for now.

  “Miss?” the assistant says. I realize that I’ve pulled my bleeding arm away from her, that I’m hugging myself.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, squeezing myself harder, despite the way blood is dripping onto my jeans. “I guess it really does hurt. Now that you mention it.”

  Tell Yourself

  “I’m not going to be here for dinner, Mom,” your daughter says. You look up from sorting the day’s junk mail to see Mary has emerged from her room wearing jeans that ride so low her pubic hair would be showing, if she had pubic hair. She swears all the middle school girls shave down there, though surely your daughter could’ve had only a few baby-fine wisps to razor away. Under your gaze she tugs her jeans up and makes an effort to pull down her shirt, but the whole production leaves six inches of bare belly and hips. “I have to go to Amber’s. Her dad’s making us lasagna for dinner.”

  “You want a ride?” you offer. You wouldn’t mind Amber’s dad seeing you in your steel-toed boots and work uniform. You wouldn’t mind reminding him that you are a formidable woman.

  “It’s only a half a mile, Mom.”

  “What on Earth do you do there all the time?”

  You shouldn’t question Mary this way about what goes on over there. If something unsavory happens between your daughter and Amber’s young and curiously attentive father, Mary is probably not going to confide in you if you seem out of your mind. She would not tell you, for example, if Amber’s father were wrestling with the girls on the braided rug and suddenly it was just he and Mary, if she relaxed beneath him and let her head fall back, if she let her narrow shoulders sink to the floor and looked up at him and parted her glossed lips, and he lowered himself onto her.

  “We’re doing a biology project. It’s a poster about cells, and it’s due tomorrow, but we haven’t started it yet,” your daughter says. She likes science, and she didn’t used to be a procrastinator. “Amber’s dad is going to help us. Did you know there are thirty-seven trillion cells in the human body?”

  Amber’s father has never been convicted of diddling with minors or of any other sex crime (you’ve looked him up on the Internet), and there is no reason for you to entertain the image of your daughter slipping down her low-rise stretch-denim jeans, or of Amber’s father situating your daughter on his lap, under a blanket. There is no reason to associate Amber’s father with your own pot-smoking neighbor whom you, as a fourteen-year-old, screwed while his wife was at work and while his young son napped in the adjacent bedroom. Both men have cowboy mustaches, but that’s all.

  “There’s no reason to put off a project until the last minute,” you tell her. And there is no reason for someone to design a midriff-revealing shirt like the one your daughter is wearing, with a pair of bigger-than-life-size cupcakes on the chest. You toss the whole pile of mail into the recycling. Calm yourself down, woman. Not all men will try to screw your daughter, however she dresses. There are men who will not even fantasize about touching her darling new breasts. Some men are distracted, for instance, or gay, while a few may actually prefer mature women.

  You sit down in the wooden rocking chair you inherited last year from your grandmother, your mother’s mother, may she rest in peace. At first you hadn’t wanted the chair—what are you, an old lady?—but it’s handmade, and you’ve found that rocking in it can take the edge off at the end of the day.

  “Did you know that the mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell?” Mary offers. She moves behind you and takes hold of the back of your chair and sends it rocking in her own annoying rhythm. Don’t complain—at least if her hands are on your chair, they’re off her cell phone for a change.

  “You’re working on a poster? Maybe I can help.”

  “So how come you broke up with Stanley Steemer?” Mary asks. “He’s the only decent boyfriend you ever had.”

  “It’s my own business,” you say to your child, “who I date. Or don’t date.” This is the first time Mary has mentioned Stan.

  “Then maybe what I do is my own business,” Mary says and cracks her gum for an invisible audience. Then she stops the chair from rocking so you are thrown forward a little. You get the idea she imagines her girlfriends are always with her, admiring her antics.

  “It’s not exactly your own business when I get called by the school principal about you flashing boys in the stairwell.”

  You stand up, cross your arms, and study the girl for whom you suffered thirteen hours of labor, the girl you’ve fed and clothed for thirteen years—though you don’t recall buying any of the revealing items she currently wears.

  “I told you, Mom. Amber dared me. We both did it. And there was another girl, too. But I was the one who got caught.” She talks casually, but she’s gripping the chair pretty hard.

  “If Amber dared you to jump over a cliff, would you do it?”

  “Yes,” she says and lets go of the chair. She tries pulling up her pants again, though she’s already working a camel toe. “Amber is stupid in science, but she’s smart about other things. She’s street-smart.”

  There has to be a calm, reasonable way to express to your daughter why she should resist showing her bo
dy the way she has been doing, without seeming overprotective or crazy or even jealous. You can’t deny how thrilled you were at the way your body got attention when you were her age. You would have bared your breasts for cute boys on a dare, no doubt.

  “You know, I had to walk home from cheerleading practice today, three miles. Stanley Steemer drove right past me. He didn’t even wave back.”

  “Stop calling him that,” you say. “Anyway, you could’ve called me to pick you up.”

  The first time Stan gave your daughter a ride home, you thanked him, but you also recalled how your mother’s boyfriend Teddy used to drive alongside you sometimes when you were walking on the old road by the power company. He’d be hotboxing a Marlboro in the driver’s seat, and he’d roll down the window and release a big cloud of smoke and tell you that you were looking fine. You thought it was flattering and funny, and you never told your mother. Not even when he molested you—at the time, it wasn’t clear what happened in the back seat, but in retrospect it is painfully clear.

  “That truck is embarrassing,” your daughter says, referring to the Al’s Appliances truck you drive for work. “You know, Nicole’s mom got a stove from Al’s, and it had a dead cockroach in it. And that guy you work with stinks like pee.”

  “Jimmy.”

  “He doesn’t have any neck. And he’s hairy like a Neanderthal.” She laughs at this inside joke as though her friends are here with her. “Mr. Glover says we’re all part Neanderthal, but some people are more than others.”

  When Stan showed up for dinner with your daughter for the fourth time, two days after the flashing incident in the stairwell, you couldn’t get it out of your head that something was wrong. And then when you kissed Stan, his jacket smelled like Mary’s fruity-candy perfume. You’ve known Stan for three years as your boys’ Little League and Rocket Football coach, and you’d been dating him for three months, and he’d been coming to dinner a couple times a week, and you told yourself there was no reason to think he did anything other than pick Mary up and bring her straight home. It wasn’t as though he’d had time to pull off into the old power company property—or that he would’ve even thought of such a thing. And after all, Stan really seemed to like you, admired your jaded view of the world, even laughed when you slipped into cursing. He’d had a rough go in his marriage, same as you, and you’d figured the two of you were kindred spirits.

  That last time he brought Mary home, when Mary was doing her in-school suspension, all through dinner you kept telling yourself to calm down and not overreact. Afterward, Stan smiled at your expectant, anxious look as he sank back into the reclining chair to watch Antiques Roadshow with you.

  “Is something the matter?” he asked. “You seem on edge.”

  “Is something going on with you and Mary?” you asked.

  Even now you can’t believe it came out of your mouth, but once it did come out you didn’t regret it. You hoped Stan would tell you, Absolutely not, never in a million years, or laugh it off and say, You’ve got to be kidding.

  “What do you mean?” He tilted his head, squinted one eye. You’d seen him adopt this posture when a little knucklehead kid was explaining why he ran to home from first base.

  “Nothing. Not really. I was just asking.” You told yourself he was nothing like your mother’s old boyfriend or your pothead neighbor, and he’d never shown any interest in Mary beyond joking around and asking her about homework and cheerleading, but you just wanted to be absolutely one hundred percent sure your daughter was safe with him.

  “Asking what? What are you asking?”

  “I smell her perfume on you.”

  “She squirted me with that crap when I told her not to use it in my car,” he said, and his speech slowed as he realized what you were suggesting. “You know what she’s like.”

  “I know, but I wondered . . .”

  You knew she’d sprayed perfume on her little brothers, too, even though it made them shriek. And of course she’d sprayed you.

  “You wondered what? If I . . . if I had, what? . . . with Mary?” He seemed to wake up then. He looked hurt, then shocked. He fumbled at his pocket for a cigarette, got it into his fingers, and then forced it back into the pack, pushed the pack into his shirt pocket again. “You’ve known me a long time. Your kids have played with my kid for years.”

  “It just seems strange you’re always giving her a ride without discussing it with me.” Your calm voice defied the turmoil you were feeling.

  “Did you see it was raining today? Should I have driven past her on the road? That would be something for a mother to complain about.” He was getting mad.

  “It’s just that . . . And I know she can be a flirt.” You hated the word as soon as you said it, though Mary was a flirt, same as you were at her age.

  “Do you hear yourself?” He sat forward on the chair and looked hard at you. His eyes narrowed, and his lips, too. “Mary’s a kid. I’m a coach. And an accusation like that could hurt me in so many ways, even beyond the personal, I can’t even begin to . . . If you really believe I’m a predator—”

  “I don’t. I just need you to tell me.”

  “For Chrissakes, you act like you don’t know me at all. And maybe I don’t know you, either.” When Stan saw your three kids appear in the hallway, his face went slack, and he got up, put on his jacket, and stormed out. The screen door slammed shut as he muttered a final word about trust.

  You weren’t really accusing him, you told yourself. You hadn’t meant to say anything, but you’d just asked.

  “I GUESS YOU can give me a ride if you really want to,” Mary says. “Oh, Mom, you should’ve seen what happened today in science. Nicole spit her gum into this girl’s hair, and the girl didn’t see it, and she kept touching her hair, and it got really stuck.”

  But really, what interest could a grown man have in a girl who chews gum the way your daughter chews her gum, noisily and with her mouth open? How could any man be interested in a girl who, whenever she isn’t texting on her phone, prattles mindlessly about the other middle-school cheerleaders, tells what happened, play-by-play, in the last movie or TV show she watched? I mean, your daughter drives you and the rest of your family crazy with that mindless prattling, and you want to slap her at least once a day for the way she rolls her eyes at something you’ve said, even as you want to wrap your arms around her and hide her and protect her. Your shoulders are hunched up around your ears. Take a deep breath, woman!

  “So the girl was going to cut the gum out of her hair, but then Mr. Glover asked if anybody had a peanut butter sandwich in their lunch bag. He said gum is hydrophobic so it doesn’t dissolve in water, so we had to take the gum out with another hydrophobic material. He wiped the peanut butter off the girl’s bread and put it on the gum and worked it out. And then he let the girl go rinse her hair in the bathroom.”

  You hope her love of science will teach her cause and effect as it pertains to her body as well as to what goes on in a science lab. You hope it will allow her to succeed in ways you never dreamed of succeeding, but you don’t know how she’s going to make it safely through the next few years. You wish she could be a nerd girl in high-waisted pants. You wish she needed glasses, at least.

  “Amber and Nicole didn’t even know what hydrophobic meant,” she says. “Can you believe it?”

  “God damn it!” you shout at last. “Can’t you see? I’m worried sick about you. I’m worried that all the motherfuckers in the world want to mess with you and get their lousy hands on your body. Yes, I’m out of my mind with worry about what you do with boys at school in the stairwell. And worse, I’m afraid some man is going to sweet-talk you and lure you into his car and molest you, Mary. And I’m worried that you might like it. Or you might go along with it even if you don’t.”

  Once you’ve said this, you can’t believe you’ve said it. But you’re not sorry you’ve said it. You don’t know how you’ve gone so long without saying it. Mary looks stunned, but less so than you’d expec
t. Her arms hang limply at her sides, and her bare belly seems more pooched and unprotected than ever. Maybe she’s been waiting for your outburst since the incident in the stairwell. You fall back into your chair in exhaustion.

  “God, Mom. That’s just gross,” she says finally. “You know I don’t like men that way. They’re too hairy.” She is trying to lighten the conversation, bless her. She tries again to pull up her pants, but even she realizes it is hopeless this time. “You know, I didn’t tell you, Mom, but me and Amber were in Cooper Park after school on Friday, and this guy was staring at my boobs, and me and Amber threw our apples at him from lunch. We pretended we were calling the cops, and he took off on his bike.”

  “But what if he wasn’t gross?” you ask. You wonder why she didn’t tell you about this on Friday. “What if he was a good-looking high school boy? A handsome football player? What if he wasn’t hairy at all? What if he shaved his whole perfect body and smelled like a flower?”

  “Oh, Mom. The guy was gross. And you can trust me. I’m not stupid. And I’m not going to get pregnant, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Did Stan ever try anything with you?” you ask and hold your breath. “Or say anything . . . sexy?”

  “Stanley Steemer?” Mary kicks at the rails of your chair and shakes her head. “You’re crazy, Mom. You worry about the weirdest things.”

  Your daughter changes her shirt at your insistence, and as soon as her phone is charged, she heads out to Amber’s house on foot, cracking her gum, shaking her head, rolling her eyes, and texting in a cloud of candy-flower perfume. You ask her to let you know when she gets there and then to be sure to call for a ride home. She mumbles an okay as the wooden screen door slaps against the frame.

  You’re busted up over Stan, more than you thought you would be, but with him gone from the house, you can be a little more certain Mary is safe. Of course, he is just one man among millions out there in the world, one of dozens of men who might take an interest in your daughter between this house and Amber’s house. You close your eyes and tell yourself that not all men are like that neighbor who allowed you to skip school at his house and smoke bowl after bowl until you couldn’t form a complete sentence. Not all teachers—even those who take a girl’s hair in their hands—are like your tall, brown-eyed social-science teacher, whose attentions flattered you so much that you would never have said no. And girls are different now, too—look how your daughter says no to you all the time, as you would never have said no to your mother for fear of being slapped. Your daughter knows so much more than you did at her age, and she might even come to you with any problems she does have, if you don’t work yourself into a state.