Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(31)

Cousin Cindy presses her hands together like she’s praying. She says, I’m sorry, but when you’re seventeen you’ll understand. She closes my door.

I’ve been reading Harriet the Spy and keeping my very own spy journal. I decide there is no better time to write, to report, than tonight with Cousin Cindy. I crawl to my bedroom door, lower the brass handle. I push it open and breathe into the triangle of light. Cousin Cindy is standing at the dresser mirror, next to the front door. She paints on black lipstick with a tiny brush, teases her curls with a pick. She clasps a big silver cross around her neck so Jesus hangs squeezed between her breasts. She sprays perfume from a diamond-shaped bottle into the air and walks right into it, spins three times.

There’s a knock on the door. It’s Alphonso, in real clothes. No life vest, no biscuits. In our house, he’s just a college boy—an Appalachian State University sweatshirt, tattered camouflage pants, a beeper clamped to his pocket. Cousin Cindy kisses him long and hard, like they’ve been waiting for this moment all their lives. She walks backward and pulls him by the sweatshirt until they reach the plaid couch. She pushes him onto it, kneels down, unzips. Alphonso doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he holds them up by his face. I think, this is what Alphonso must have looked like as a child—this face widened with shock and awe—a boy who tripped over his sandcastle, who peeled open the eyes of a newborn kitten, a boy who just destroyed something for the first time.

I write down what I see. Their limbs tangle, and the two of them fall asleep like this. I am jealous of Alphonso, seeing my cousin this way, this other view of her body. I want to be closer. I want this image of a woman all for myself.

My parents walk in soon after. What the from the raft? our daughter, where? / the biscuit boy?

I never see Alphonso again.



Cousin Cindy, taking me to my second concert in the world. I’m eleven. It’s Britney Spears, and Britney is wearing white leather pants with pink patches on her knees. We’re in the first row—my mother bought us the tickets—and Cousin Cindy is sneaking drags from her Newports, blowing the smoke beneath our seats. The bouncer wraps his hand around her neck, tells her it’s okay—I won’t tell if you won’t, sweetheart—and she gives him a wink.

I am standing, dancing, my belly showing like Britney, but Cousin Cindy stays knees-up in her folding seat. She acts annoyed, but every once in a while I catch her mouthing the words—My loneliness is killing me—smiling. I can tell there is something inside her that is burning to be here. The lights, the glamour, Britney’s long, plastic ponytail, the bubblegum beat. I think, Cousin Cindy should have been a star. She has never talked about a life she wants, but maybe this is it. Maybe she was right to drop out of beauty school. Maybe she’s meant to be the glittering girl on this stage, uglier girls at her feet, their hands cupped around their mouths screaming Cindy! Cindy! as she pauses before the last word of everyone’s favorite song, closing her eyes, making the whole world beg for it.

Cousin Cindy is sad on the car ride home. She chain-smokes, pops the car lighter, bites the side of her lip till the scarlet drags off. She says it’s a good thing I have her to take me to these concerts, to show me a good time. It’s a good thing she’s around to take care of me, since my parents are so fucked. Fucked how? I ask. I’ve never heard the words used in quite this way. Cracked out, she says. Coke, rocks, all that shit. Your parents are the reason I’ll never get high, swear to God, that shit ain’t for me. You’re so goddamn lucky you got your Cousin Cindy.



Cousin Cindy, calling my first cell phone. I’m thirteen.

Your mom can’t hear, right?

No way.

I’ve got a new job in Hollywood. It’s rad; the people are nice. I’m tired all the time but most of all, I miss you. Come out, she says, I miss my baby.

Hollywood, Florida, is nothing like the Hollywood on television. There are no movie stars, no hills. Instead, there’s a trash mountain big enough to block out the sunset, where men in jumpsuits torch diapers under the buzzards. My mother says I’m not allowed to go to this Hollywood, this particular block Cousin Cindy is describing, where sex shops line the streets in mean yellows.

I can’t come, I tell Cousin Cindy. You know I can’t. Everybody knows about your job and what it is.

Jesus Christ, it’s not like I’m a stripper, she says. I’m a waitress at a strip club. I serve drinks, chicken wings. I don’t take my shit off.

I know. I didn’t say—

Tell your mother I don’t take my shit off.

We know.

I need my baby, she says. I’m lonely. Just come down for lunch, will you? The wings are so good here. You’d like them. Extra hot.



A weekend with Cousin Cindy. It’s been a while since the Julia Roberts movies and the matching manicures and the Tell me, how’s it like in real school? So goddamn rich the kids have diamonds on their cell phones, no? You still have those spy laptops? Those yacht parties?

Tonight we’re on a cruise ship because I am this winter season’s Grand Champion Equestrian. It’s the end-of-the-year awards banquet, and the Wellington Horse Show Association wants to hand off ribbons taller than I am, little statues and trophies with golden ponies on top. My parents haven’t left their bedroom in almost a week, so Cousin Cindy volunteered.