Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(4)

And kids live there? I ask. Kids like me?

Kids live everywhere, he says, and I’m terrified. Until this moment, I have never even considered children my age living outside the Mainland. That’s what we call the United States in my family. Everything except Hawai?i is the Mainland. My Grandma Rose is from China, and Hawai?i, but in my mind she has always been curled over and ancient. Pink foam rollers in her hair, fingers like ginger root. Never, ever a child.

Most of my letters come from other girls in elementary schools. They tell me about their P.E. teachers, some hobbies, what their parents make them for dinner; they include the loopy initials of their crushes. Honestly, I’d expected more. I write back to as many as I can, but too many come. I keep the unanswered in the bottom of my dresser, the ones that do the least for me. Whenever I drop a new letter into the dark of that drawer, I open the drawer very quickly, looking away, blinking back the guilt of it.

And then there are the men. The men mostly write about their dreams. They dream of gangrenous toes and a God with pierced ears and Bill Clinton dressed in a nightgown. Sometimes, they confess things to me: I want to move to California. I feel like a failure and was born a failure and will never not be a fat, old, failure. I’d like to learn to play the piano and leave my wife. They can trust me, they write, and I believe them. I have always been talented at keeping secrets. So far, it’s been my only job.

One man always asks me questions about riding my horses and how that must feel. To tame something so wild and dangerous, like a gun loaded right between my legs.

Jet, like the plane, is my favorite of the men. He wasn’t the first man to write me, but I like his letters best. Jet has called me interesting, and sweet seeming, and a different kind of pretty. He believes that O. J. Simpson is a madman gone free. My mother doesn’t trust O. J. either, so I immediately believe in this Jet.

Jet tells me he lives on a houseboat, but his address lists a street in Virginia Beach. He owns three yellow labs named after dead movie stars—no other family. Jet is fifty-one, my father’s age, and he writes in tiny, lowercase letters—always a runny blue ink. He uses crisp, narrow envelopes that smell like something sour.

What do you think about most often? he recently asked me.

My ponies, I wrote. And my heroes. Dominique Moceanu and the rest of the Magnificent Seven, but especially the white Dominique. I think about flying. I think about Drew Barrymore and how it would sound for Leonardo DiCaprio to say my name. I think about fax machines because those things are crazy. Mostly, I think about JonBenét Ramsey. She’s my number one hero of all time.

Jet tells me that I can call him J-Daddy and that this name is reserved only for me. Reading this feels like the first glint of something grown-up in my life, a slice through my stomach clean as a kite through the sky. Reserved only for me. I repeat these words. I address him this way in all my letters because I want to be his, and because he wants to be mine, and because nicknames sound so very adult. I write Hello, J-Daddy, and My Dearest J-Daddy, and My Darling Dearest Daddy with all capital D’s, I want to know everything about everything you’ve ever done and I want to know how you did all of those things and were you scared when you did them?

I’ve stopped writing everybody else back, except the girl in Madagascar. The drawer has thickened so much it’s difficult to close. If you want to know the truth, marrying Jet feels like the only thing left to do.

Doris Day, Judy Garland, Rita—these are the names of his dogs. Jet loves glamour. He promises that one day he’ll show me the classic films of our lives, promises that once I see the actresses’ faces blown up in Technicolor, once I see the smoke of their cigarettes genie up and out of the screens, their slender wrists, their backless silks, I will understand what it means to be a woman. This is something I am dying to know.

I have a future with Jet, and that seems to be something all girls are supposed to have. I hear this word all the time at school, at home: Future. How about your future? Time magazine recently published a story about cars driving themselves on roads paved with magnets, but I can’t imagine myself inside one of them. Before Jet, I imagined myself murdered by twenty, or off with Joni Baloney in a tent somewhere, nowhere in this future.

Now, I think maybe we could grow old together on his boat. I can see us holding each other through the darkness of Y2K, surviving. The world will rise with water, and I will learn how to swim. Maybe this future-me will even wear glasses. Our future, Jet writes. You and me. You are my future.

Lately, my mother walks around the house all night long while I’m trying to sleep. Ignore her when she does that, my father says, she’s just zombie walking, restless legs, but when he’s out at night, which is usually, I like to lead her back into her bedroom like a horse into a trailer. I say, Shhhh, shhhh—it’s just us. My hands tuck the blankets around her frame; my fingers comb through her hair. She stares right through me and says, What kind of person will you be?

Jet has been very specific about our plans to meet. I cannot tell anyone about it, and I suppose that makes it better. I know my father will not like J-Daddy, but perhaps, I think, my mother might come around. Maybe Jet will tell her about his childhood, and about his dogs, the way he holds them at night when they’re too frightened to sleep, all the things he has told me. He could tell her about our real love, describe what it means for me to be an old soul, how he is the only one who has ever, truly, clearly, seen it.