Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(21)

Each night, my mother boils the combs and tools in pots of water. She tumbles my clothes and blankets on high. She places my stuffed animals in the freezer. She drops my jewelry into tiny plastic bags, seals them tight. She stays at my bedside kissing every knuckle of my hands until I fall asleep.

They chose you because you’re the sweetest, she says.

When I wake in the middle of the night, it’s not because my mother and father are throwing ashtrays and glasses at each other. There are no crashing sounds. No cries. No smells of burning plastic or voices belonging to people who are neither my mother nor my father. Instead, this week, I wake to the hum of my mother’s vacuum. She is covering every inch of the house—checking, cleaning, protecting every pillow—as if, by this simple act of cleaning, she is making the promise of a new life for me, a life in which two parents take care of a child. A life as simple as that.

By the following week, the bugs are gone. My mother checks the tender spots behind my ears. The warm places behind my neck.

Nothing, she says. All good to go.

Are you sure? I ask. I still itch.

You’re good, she says. Nothing. She tears off her cap. Kisses me on the forehead.

I’m sure you’re thrilled to go back to school. She winks.

Later that night, in the bathroom mirror, I move my palms back to my part. I press down on the hair again; again; I wait. This time, I don’t see anything. I don’t see anything moving at all. My hair is just my hair. My scabs have peeled. There’s nothing alive on any inch of my head—no nymphs, no nits, no lice.

But they were right here, I say.



THE LIZARD

Here’s another early memory: I’m chewing up a grilled cheese sandwich on the floor of my living room when I see it, the lizard, dashing out from behind the TV unit. It skitters across our white tiles on its lizard legs. Its head twitches around and around, looking for something in lizard motion, unpredictable in a way that makes me feel sick. I don’t trust it.

My father is asleep on the couch, a sports game blaring, the remote still gripped in his hand. His chapped mouth hangs open; he’s zonked but balanced, almost poised, on an elbow.

I pick up one of his empty glasses off the coffee table, a thick layer of extra crystal on the bottom of it. I’m clumsy with the glass; my hand can’t even wrap the circumference. I sniff the inside. Gag, dramatically. I decide I must capture the lizard, show it who’s boss. I decide that I must take control, for once, of a situation.

The lizard is unmoving beneath the kitchen counter. I take off crawling toward it, and it runs. I stand up, chase the lizard into the kitchen. I rush it up and down the wall, cupping my glass against the paint. My bare feet slap-slap the tile as I chase the lizard through the hallway, and down one step, until it slides beneath the mildewed crack of the garage door. This isn’t enough. Now that I’m chasing it, now that my chest is pumping, now that the lizard is scared, I don’t want to stop. I open the door and let my eyes adjust. Sunlight leaks around the garage door like a glowing picture frame. I look under paint buckets, around the oily car stains, I will find it, and then I do: the lizard, motionless, in the far right corner of the garage.

You can trust me, I say, Shhhhhh.

I move slowly, carefully. I make my voice sound high and coddling.

This time, when I approach it, the lizard does not run. It stares at me, breathing, its little red lizard balloon pumping at its throat.

I’m not going to hurt you, I say. I said that.

Once I am squatting right next to the lizard, I move the glass out from behind my back. I stare at the lizard, its darting eyes, the tiniest nails. I hold the base of the glass in my palm; I am perfectly still for two counts of Mississippi before I snap the empty side down, right on top of the lizard. The glass does not break, but the lizard does. The edge of the glass has severed the tail off, right in the center. It went down smooth, without resistance, as if the tail were made of lizard putty. The lizard tail begins waggling across the concrete garage floor while the rest of the body jumps inside the glass, pushing against it.

My scream cleaves the air as I run back into the house.

I never take the glass off the lizard. I never let the air in. Instead, I become afraid of the garage from that day forward, that awful rubbery smell, what it meant to be a grown-up.

For years, the lizard came to me each time I began falling asleep. I couldn’t push it out from behind my eyes—all those lizard movements—the way it had finally trusted me. I thought of the way I had chased it, the blood rush of that. I thought of not much else. A body, severed, does not die right away. It fights, thrashes. Every part of it remembers.



CHICKEN & STARS

My mother is late, later than usual. I’m waiting outside the middle school building under the palms, alone, and I wonder if she’s fallen asleep somewhere. I wonder if she remembers it’s a school day.

My mother and father have been in their Other Place lately—the place they go when the sweating glasses come out, the pipes and powders and smokes that smell like acrylic nail drills. I’ve been calling them Magic Sticks, because it is only a matter of minutes between the blaze of those glass sticks and that Other Place, where my mother’s voice changes pitch and her throat bobs differently and suddenly there’s danger outside every window—bandits or elephants or the FBI or my dead grandfather—and we all play along with the same fantasies and fears.