Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(3)

Grandma Yukling-Kam-Rosebud taught me to set the typewriter margins when she came and visited from Hawai?i. She told me to write an autobiography, because it’s a good thing—sometimes—to remember your life. Instead, I’ve been writing about a girl named Joni Baloney. Joni is exactly like me except she’s white and athletic and people tend to grope her. She’s bullied at school and chomps on sandwiches under an exotic, drooping tree. She can’t help her preference for baloney. In chapter 2, boys rip off her underwear at recess and take turns wearing the damp cotton over their heads, so Joni Baloney runs away, pantyless, and joins a traveling freak show, rocketing horses off high-dive boards. Joni wears bikinis and makes it big and that’s that. I can do things like that when I write—pluck any thread of want and weave a whole world.

I have a new favorite section of TigerBeat—the pen pal ads—because these kids seem lonely, too. The ads feature square blocks of photographed faces with little stories about each kid, a home address below the story. Anyone can send mail directly to the addresses, no parents necessary, a feature that will soon be discontinued.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a letter to the magazine with a picture of myself. I wanted to look wanted. I handed my father a cardboard camera and clenched my jaw so the marbles of my temples would show. I covered my braces with my lips. When we picked up the photos from the drugstore, I felt proud of the stillness in my eyes—the absolute focus. In most of the pictures my hair is slicked back, but even without hair, I am still a girl.

To the magazine I wrote, Hi Hello my name is T Kira but please DEAR GOD forget the T. I am obsessed with riding horses and I like to palm the tassels that hang from my grandmother’s drapes and yes I would like a real camera for Hanukkah and yes I would like an instrument, any instrument, for Christmas and yes I do like the smell of a gas pump but really what I would really, really love is a pen pal, yes, and Thank you. I promised to write back. I promised to keep secrets. I wrote many lists like this but only chose the best parts to send. Small, sweet facts. I spritzed the envelope with Cucumber Melon body spray, sprinkled glitter all over the wet bull’s-eye of sweet.

I see it in the checkout line at an East Boca convenience store. I’m at a Palmetto Park strip mall with my mother. My father is next door at the bar, but he doesn’t know that we know it. We’ll stop for groceries, my mother had said, picking me up from school, and check for your magazine. And let’s make a bet—will Daddy’s car be in the lot?

Daddy’s car is in every lot, or driveway, whenever we play this game. Whenever we come looking. It’s amazing, I think, really something, how my parents share this telepathic connection. A few months before the convenience store, my mother took one of my father’s golf clubs to his Jaguar. The cracks spread over the driver’s seat window until the glass went soft looking, like chiffon. Since then, I wonder why we continue playing the Bet Daddy’s Car Game.

My mother places cartons of juice on the rolling belt of the checkout line. Behind the black cage wire of the magazine rack, I see it. The dimpled smiles of the Hanson brothers; Leonardo DiCaprio, tugging down the V of his shirt; each Spice Girl lined up in a row. I yank it off the shelf and please, just imagine it, opening something this beautiful with your own face inside. Your own shape shining on real paper. You could trace me with a pencil if you wanted to.

I show my mother, and then the grocery clerk, and then my mother again. Look, look, it’s ME! My mother grabs all the issues off the shelf, but I tell her to put them back. People won’t see it if we buy them ALL. I hand her the one magazine.

You’re smart, she says, I’ll keep you. She pets the top of my head.

Can we go in the bar and show Daddy?

He’s busy, she says.

It’s true—he always was.

That night, I read my ad aloud to myself under the covers, with a flashlight. I pretend to be a stranger finding me, folding a dog-ear over to remember my black-and-white face—a very interesting girl. I check and recheck the words to make sure my address is printed correctly beneath my picture—7127 Baybreeze Court, Boca Raton, Florida, 33428. I wait for a pebble-tap at the window, a flashlight pulsing in a Morse code I will instantly understand, telling me to get moving, to come outside, to leave quietly. My bag is packed in my closet—it’s been there for months. I wait for any knock of the living.

Hundreds of letters arrive. Every day, after school, my mother pulls right up to the mailbox for me. We are supposed to have uniform mailboxes here in Boca, rounded and silver like bullets, but my mother does not believe in uniform. Instead, she purchased and installed a spray-painted hummingbird mailbox the color of a sunset, with wooden wings that spread two feet wide. I pull the bird’s beak to open the mouth of it, and letters burst from its tin stomach. I gather the letters in my arms, between my legs in the car; I press them to my chest.

Each letter comes in a different envelope, a new shape and bulk, different arrangements and patterns of stamps. Each smells like it came from another world entirely, and I do my best to imagine each country, state, bedroom, glass of milk. My favorite stamps have exotic animals printed on them. My favorite stamps come from Madagascar.

What’s Madagascar? I ask my father one night. My father knows everything.

He spins our globe in his hands until the Earth looks small. He lists off the oceans, the tiny seas. He sips his drink.

Here, he says, pointing. Right here. This little chunk of land in the water.