My Mother Was a Girl Teen in the 1970s
Earl Park New Jersey. Right next to Buena pronounced B-YEW-N-A 40-minute drive to Philly seven-minute walk to King’s Department Store yellow turtleneck scrunched-up yellow socks yellow room.
Earl Park New Jersey. Right next to Buena pronounced B-YEW-N-A 40-minute drive to Philly seven-minute walk to King’s Department Store yellow turtleneck scrunched-up yellow socks yellow room. The picture isn’t sepia it’s just the colour of the dead grass and who bought a camera? It was not a birthday gift. She says, I didn’t know everyone else didn’t put coffee in cereal. I asked for it in the morning at a sleepover.
They had all laughed at her. Joke’s on them because she was beautiful; joke’s on her because being beautiful comes with stiffness behind your knees. You are not allowed to bend even though you want to. You can’t shrink. I hated, she says, going to King’s. He used to make me buy my clothes there. All of them. Her father. She was tall and I think ankles as synonymous. Turquoise. I don’t think anyone let her have it. Right there, she gestures. Do you see that house? It’s the biggest one on the street and it looks like half a castle and next to it lived the boys who gutted it on her door. A squirrel. A rabbit. They left carcasses for her to find and she doesn’t tell me what she did with them. Linda Fussili lived there. We’re at the stoplight, and my mother points to La Michoacana. I don’t know when they made it a restaurant, she says. She looked just like Karen Carpenter. I hand over her lipstick and she puts it on in the driver’s side mirror. Do you like it? she asks, and it’s the wrong colour and I say, Yes. She takes the right on Landis and parks outside the driveway; we go in the garage and pass the Nulle Bastardo Carborundum sign. In the living room, we clump on the couch, where the bed used to be, and I stare at the photo on the wall, her and her sister. Her sister’s in the chair, and she’s cross-legged below it. I ask, Did they make you sit on the floor? I don’t remember, she says. She’s fiddling with her phone now, which is a reminder: the stories aren’t on demand. The stories aren’t even stories: they are snippets. Something like Aunt Monica, where Aunt means best friend, and yearbook means moped, and bus means Maria Diarrhea. What the boys called her to tease her and she must’ve been beautiful. On the bus to school, my mother tells me, which must’ve been middle because her elementary was close enough to walk. In high school she drove with Aunt Monica whose parents owned Giurella Bakery. Cigarette salesman, she says about her father, until he hurt his back. And then he was—what? No one could tell. Maybe printing. In the photo on the wall she is wearing a turquoise hair clip. I’ve asked her before what happened to it and again: I don’t remember. I’ve asked her for more pictures but they never turn up. What picture would they have used? This is the only one in Earl Park: her sister in the chair, my mother on the floor. Her King’s pants are too short, and her scrunched-up yellow socks show.Yellow doesn’t smell like gasoline. Yellow smells like sheets loaned from the hospital; like someone who tried to press flowers.I look at it and think, She is unbelievably lovely. I look at her and watch her fingers because neither of us have wrists and she doesn’t have them in the photo on the wall either, just a long drop between arm and oval nail. She hustles me in the bathroom and there she gets childlike: we huddle under pink tile and she says, Shh. What? I ask, and she says, Let’s just wait. Let’s hide out here until he figures out we’re gone. I want to ask, What do you mean until he figures it out? It was just the three of us, and now neither of us are there. Instead I watch her spit her gum into a tissue. Put paper down on the toilet, she tells me. I perch on the edges very carefully, avoiding the vinyl seat, and she says Good. I watch her fingers in the mirror as she works on her hair. She’s plucking the waves that have frizzed now that she’s older, but were once long and smooth: check the picture. They were long, and now she holds them up with hairspray. They require resuscitation. If I were to ask her why she tells me about the socks, she would frown and go into the turtleneck. Then the yellow walls of her room. Then the accident on Landis, in which four of her friends—Ricky Cardonese, one of them—plowed into the gas station. They were drunk, she says, all of them except Ricky. Yellow doesn’t smell like gasoline. Yellow smells like sheets loaned from the hospital; like someone who tried to press flowers. Piss, she doesn’t say, and no one here has mould. It’s too dry. It cracks red in the stoplights above La Michoacana. I have not heard one thing about how anybody got here. Yellow, she says, and they did not let me pick.
All of the descriptions are violent. They come with a list of objects. Little studs. Chain hearts. Tortoiseshell rings. It’s called accumulation, and it’s supposed to tie you down. Things are meant to make you identifiable. You can click through, and they let you see the pictures. I don’t know when they took them, but some of the silver doesn’t have rust. It can’t be real silver. Girls with real silver don’t turn up where they turned up, which always follows curled. Not tucked, but found stashed. Sometimes in a suitcase. More likely, more often, hidden but still visible. Not zipped up into anything anywhere. Their whole bodies, curling into themselves like snail shells, except cannot get out. They are tiny and trapped in their ephemeral 14. Rings on their thumbs and forefingers. Dyed hair that was dyed twice and is ringed in three colours—natural: strawberry blond, red roots, honey. I always wonder how they know this: how visible the crown is. In order for box dye to take, you have to have patient hands. With some of it, too, you have to think, How does no one know her? Some of the details are startlingly original. Harley Davidson meet-up top with “’76 Albuquerque.” Was likely acquired from the event itself. Things like Tattoo of initials “JM” and “TLM.” Or Found carrying brochure for troubled girls’ home. The home will be 1,600 miles, across the country. It would’ve creased, and she would’ve flattened it out. Pressed it on her knees, both bare, with her palm flat. Hair long and dark and clipped back with barrettes. Not quite overbite, and no significant dental work done. A lot of them have it, and it doesn’t help.
They have white zig-zags and stretch marks and the sites say gave birth but I know how it is for teenage girl skin. It’s just growing. The ones with stretch marks always pulling jackets downward pulling hoodies pulling fleece fake collar on the line.What they have is crooked chins and jaws that hang rounded. They have baby hairs and bent noses, the wonderful freckled kind, the kind that’s sweet when you scrunch Irish like I always wanted, and butterfly blond eyelashes. They have white zig-zags and stretch marks and the sites say gave birth but I know how it is for teenage girl skin. It’s just growing. The ones with stretch marks always pulling jackets downward pulling hoodies pulling fleece fake collar on the line. Sometimes there is nothing that tells you what goes on except for a chip in the side of the teeth, and it could just be grinding. Sometimes there is not even that. Yellow socks, to the ankles, scrunched down. Some girl in a refrigerator. It’s such a hard word to spell: mark it with a red pen. Mark it on a 10th-grade spelling test. Try harder next time! Next time will be another state, a different coastline. Or the same town and a different school. Or the oil standstills, with the cold water bubbling into mud. Maybe some girls will never see the ocean and maybe some will sleep with their backpacks tucked under their heads. It’s hard to imagine because I did not know it, but they must’ve gotten sand in their eyes. They must’ve awoken on park benches groggy and tired, then pushed the food someone comped them on their plate. Pushed food they stole, then spat out: awful. It is always your right to refuse. It is your right to be 14, cocky and groggy, tough-girl and scared with your fingertips out. With your long roots showing, no matter how brassy. Sometimes, the descriptions will say chewed nails. Once, it said, Chewed nails. Should make it easy to identify. I thought, Bullshit. If you wait on a bus, if you sit with your legs drawn up or even sprawled out, feeling concrete on your back thighs, you chew. You gnaw. You nibble. No one ever talks about it, but you might use one nail to pick the others. Not to see blood, but to see how raw you can get them. To see how much you can possibly take off. To see at what point—and not just on the fingers, on the toes too—the nail will stop being a thing at all. Until you reveal the pink what below it. Nobody knows what it actually is. Not blood, and not skin: it’s a raw mewling something. It’s very hard to reach: it takes years and years. And if you don’t, you have the consolation of the new skin ridge. Something that hardens you can rip and rip and rip. Every teenage runaway chews all her nails back. And every other girl who’s walked down the street. Every girl who’s crossed her legs and said, Not yet. Maybe. Everyone, you all, you go ahead. Every girl who’s leaned against the side of a car that’s not hers and doesn’t want to know the man inside but the window is rolled down and the green paint is hot in the light of the old and abominable sun. No one tells her to get in the car, and she leaves the man, keeps walking, sits on the curb and wishes she had something to count. She does not like to count cars and school let out early. It is warm and yellow and 1976. She walks by a clinic that is not labeled clinic and she keeps going, down to the corner store. She talks to people she knows, someone she is not friends with. She goes to a not-home to fall asleep. Or her shoes scuff, and she keeps walking. We never see night: it is not very late. She is always noon or one-thirty. It is always not too late, in the middle of the day. Someone, absolutely. Someone could’ve seen her. The desk clerk says, Wait now. There’s still time. The desk tells them to wait, and no paperwork is filed, because it’s what happens. Sometimes they just go. A lot of times, girls like that. A lot of times they take off. And that’s if they’re reported. No one comes down to the police station, and no one tries to put in paperwork. No one says rings and no one says heart-eyes and no one says, She would wear a Harley shirt. Maybe they think of them, 20 years after, living a life they couldn’t reach. Maybe they imagine tucked-in domesticity. Not curled. Tucked means not alone.
Aunt Monica, my mother says. I drove her to her abortion. She scrunches up her wrong mouth behind the wheel. I drove her in her car. Later, I find out a college friend skipped her prom to drive another girl across state lines. She was from Utah, and I don’t know the geography. Nevada, maybe. Across the sand. My mother does not tell me the make of Aunt Monica’s so I have to imagine. A Cadillac. No, a purple-red thing—and I do not know anything about cars. Where, I wonder, did you tell him you were going? but I am smart enough to realize he didn’t ask.
She stares through me, which is her caught way of looking. When I’ve snatched her at the edge of herself.Her mother—my grandmother—starved to death in the living room. In the hospital bed they got to wheel in. Starved to death and I say it sometimes because it is shocking, barbaric, and it doesn’t belong to me so I can. When it happens—when something like that happens to you—you can’t talk. You cannot tell. You cannot bring your lips to form, My mother starved to death in the living room. A half-step from the fake Oriental rug. It took a long time for her to go; that I know because she comes up in the details of what my mother tells me—when she was eight, when she was 14, then later. I did not learn to cook is not what my mother says. She asks, Do you want to help? You don’t have to help. She doesn’t like cooking: her hands move too quickly. When my friends come over, they say she’s exceptional. She goes to Botto’s and buys store-made gravy and lets it simmer as long as homemade. She wants it homemade even though she doesn’t need to. No one cares, I tell her. No one cares. She stares through me, which is her caught way of looking. When I’ve snatched her at the edge of herself. I did not learn to cook, and no one watched me. No one taught me to braid hair, tender in nails, or to choose a dress that doesn’t pucker at the hip seams. To set a limit that she could defy. Don’t come home past 10. No skirts above your fingertips. When there are no rules, aimlessly is the word. You wander, and you trip, and when you trip no one sees you. You can walk as long as you want and there is no one to give chase. There comes a point when you’re on the edge of the streetlight and all that’s ahead is another one and you think I can go— The dash is go farther. You can just keep keep keep walking. What is out there is more streetlights. A million roads. They were not running toward anything. I do not ask my mother where the four in the car were going, Ricky Cardonese, because I know the answer is not party or drive-in or school or even home. It is they were going. No destination, and the gas station appeared when it did because that was what happened when the street was too dry to hold you. It cracked, rarely and sometimes. It is why my mother does not care when I gnaw my nails. She knows what surrounds me, which is a world that is complete and has failsafes. There is always someone I can ask for help. The ground still opens up for other people, but not me. It will not, and it doesn’t matter how my cuticles tear. My father will be there to pull up in his car. Where, he will say, are you going? My friends on the sidewalk will walk, and I will be embarrassed, and he will park the car and shepherd me back. We were just going, I’ll tell him, to the Amish Market, and his silence will be silence that I will not understand because to me, and to me, nothing can happen. In the kitchen, my mother, who is too thin, scares. She cannot put on weight because there is no weight to put on; she is skinnier than she was in the living room. In the portrait with her sister, sitting with her legs pulled. Her feet are out of sight but I can tell the ash. They will have ash as a callus on the knuckles and she buys me, now, a pedicure stone. Use it, she says. It’ll make your feet soft and I rub it on the soles until I get bored. A tattoo of a dove on the front of her hand. Initials—initials like the tires. Intractable marks. Moped, she says. My ninth-grade boyfriend. I had never heard of him before. I do not get to learn his name. He was on a moped and a car hit him in his driveway. I ask her, How did you feel? She scrunches her mouth and says, I wrote a poem for the yearbook like it’s an answer and I think, What? Four years later four friends crashing and the carcasses on the doormat. It is a stained thing, in the shadow of blood. In the shadow of blood that has always been dried blood; in the shadow of blood that is already there because if you have it like that, if there is so much of it, you can’t afford to let it beat out. It is as regular as dried grass, as the pattern of footsteps going down down down down down down and across, as the swinging green stoplight and the bedroom you don’t sleep in and you can’t afford to pick it loose. Pick it loose, pick it open. Pry the scab off your right hand right between your thumb and forefinger triangle skin. It was never a wound: it came up scabbed over. Open your mouth, and the chatter of teeth. The chatter of teeth. They would not stop chattering. If they let themselves talk: their tongues pink and thick. Brown and thick, like the pictures. Swollen tongues sideways. Swollen tongues horribly luxurious. Lolling like there’s nowhere to be in the world, sprawling themselves out of cut-up lips. What is it like to be a mouth that only opens when all the other muscles are forced to relax. They spring to themselves and out of themselves suddenly. Release. Exhale. Open up and speak. Speak and an exhale. Inside the refrigerator, it comes out only as a puff of blue air.
Would you? I would ask them. Would you tell me? They would be closer to it; they could feel it between their toes. They would be able to put it to me in some form. Even if they wouldn’t know why I asked. They would start with the little fringed details. A poncho and a stone ring; a gum wrapper sketch of a flower. I want to know, What did you doodle? And what would you have drawn if you were good enough? Tell me the last seven digits of your address. What songs did you love and then forget about? Forgetting is a luxury. It is the most beautiful thing: the freedom to forget. To tuck a memory so important behind your earlobe. To brush it back like a piece of hair. Every day seems so long until you stand in hindsight and then the stretch, the walk, cuts itself short. It takes scissors and makes snowmen of the highlights. The paper ones that you hang in your room. An ornament and alone, and, Did you ever have one? Did you ever sleep in a place called yourself and I know the answer is no because every one of them traveled with everything that marked them on their neck and their hands. Hanging from their earlobes. Tiger’s eye and it was cheap, it must’ve been cheap because how else could they afford? Stealing, some of them, and others brushed a table. Others saw it and thought, It has to be mine. Or maybe not consciously: maybe they picked it up, careless. Maybe they counted out the quarters because it was nice. Because it sparkled in a way they liked and the stone was pretty. It shouldn’t have had to mean anything.
Now it’s stinging and boredom is just ossified things you’ve accepted and that’ve hardened over, hardened like the candy the honey frozen solid that they sell at the convenience store.Sing it, I want to say. Tell me your stories. Tell me especially about the banal. Tell me about the way you pulled your sweater and what made your nose itch. Tell me about how you laughed at the Halloween decorations. They scared everyone else, everyone except you, and tell me how you learned to rollerblade and how you didn’t care that you were in the middle or that the skates pinched your toes and that you could smell them when you went to tie the laces. You never double knotted. You could go around the rink and tell me about the places, tell me where you moved before you went that final time, that trip they said runaway. Tell me about the buses and the names of the roads. Or if it was one place, tell me about it. Your stepfather too young and too mean and his bangs; your father and your mother and the real one and her brown eyes. Tell me about the doll whose dress you wore out. Tell me about the woman who bought you a doll because she saw you and felt bad and your mother screamed and you didn’t understand and you loved it and then later, for a reason that you didn’t know, you hated it. It took a long time for you to hate it and by then the gingham which you’d thought once was beautiful had come to be worn and you took the doll and picked it up and hid it under the cushion but it was still there you knew it so you threw it across the room. The sound when it landed wasn’t satisfying so you left the house and you couldn’t remember the first time, the first time you had just walked out, because it had been always, and you went down the street to the makeshift park. You sat on the swings and you rocked yourself, back-forth, and it was not a comforting mechanism because for it to be it would have to mean something, and it didn’t: it was just something to do when it stung too much or you were bored. Now it’s stinging and boredom is just ossified things you’ve accepted and that’ve hardened over, hardened like the candy the honey frozen solid that they sell at the convenience store. It doesn’t feel good to have it make your cheeks numb; you don’t know how anyone else keeps it in that long. They all do, and it looks like they’re enjoying it. You take it out and rub the dirt over its glass. Or tell me about standing at the mirror with your blue comb. Your blue plastic comb with letters on the side, printed in gold: CAR WASH. Printed for free, no brand. It could be any in the neighbourhood. You’re brushing your hair down, your hair that you’ve dyed from the box that a friend—well she really isn’t a friend—let you have. The two of you are sometimes in the bathroom together and she said, It’ll look nice on you and you knew enough to trust that it wouldn’t but looking nice is all that you can hope for. You certainly will not look beautiful. You want to know yourself by anything other than what you will come to be known for: pink birthmark, not purple like they usually are. Obsidian toe ring. The birthmark just below your big left eye. You want to be known for what you wouldn’t tell them if they asked you who you were, and you trusted them enough to speak about you. If you trusted yourself enough to search not your insides but the things you thought before you fell asleep and the other things, the ordinary things, while you were walking. The idle thoughts you had on your way to class. The thoughts you had walking home, while you passed the sock factory and the bakery and you thought how white one of the birds was. A white bird you had never seen, and maybe they were all that colour. Are they, and where do they go? Wondering if this is south for the winter. Wondering if they cluster together at night. Do birds, you ask yourself, travel in packs, by species: the cardinals together, then the bluebirds, then the sparrows, all with their own territory? Maybe that’s why you only see cardinals by the supermarket and the geese in the back ferns by the houses with crests on their moulding. You wonder, then, if birds have names: not just individual ones, but nicknames as well, and if their trills come into a language. You want it not to just be tone that they respond to. You want them to have a way of understanding each other, of not having to guess: of being able to reach across the branch, across the wide sky, perched seconds away from each other, and to know what’s been said. Of perfect, seamless, faultless understanding, and their beaks opening like a banana peel. Just as hard and just as legible.
The wrong question is why it didn’t happen to my mother. The right one is that of course it did. What it means is that some of them were found in suitcases and some kept going. The road went on but it did not open up. Some of them walked right on and kept walking, and what matters is not the suitcase itself: it is not the refrigerator, or who did it. It’s what happened so they could walk at all. What happened so that if they were—if it did open, and they found them—they wouldn’t be able to figure out their names. What happened so they’d have to come up with a picture. Something called facial reconstruction. Something that does not, does not look like her, does not look anything like her but there’s no one to tell. No one to point at it and say, That’s not and if there were it wouldn’t be what mattered. Now she is a thing with tortoiseshell rings and if they had a name for her it would only be a name and it doesn’t happen to all girls. It only happens to some of them. Some girls your car passing you look at on the street and think, You are headed— and you can’t think of anywhere. You and your car and the shadow of the road. The long shadow of a gas station that reflects in the white of the chalk of the telephone poles that swing not at all in the rhythm of her step. Her hair parted in the centre and the static forms an aura but it’s just the camera. It wouldn’t have been real. All you would’ve seen then is a girl going by with a tuck of red-blond brass-blond hair and thought there. She is going. She is going— The car would keep on, and your view would cut out. On the forums they say, Beautiful. For every Doe they say, Beautiful, absolutely beautiful even if she is not. For the girls with the long chins, the girls with crooked noses and the girls just okay, the girls unexceptional. Beautiful because it is our way of saying, the only one we have, that she mattered. What it means is, She should’ve been worth something. Or: she is. Believe that she was. She is not disposable. In the just sense of the world in which your world has corners there’s the sense that someone, somewhere, should’ve stepped in. That there are and were people like this: people who intervene, come in to help. That one of them, somehow, should have been there. Better to believe that than to know sometimes, it happens. That sometimes, no one will come. That sometimes you’ll keep walking and you’ll stay walking and you’ll be walking because of what happened and you’ve been allowed to turn into a description. A vague memory someone will say, Hey. A newspaper photograph. A gas station street smudge. A portrait with crossed ankles in a living room. Is my mother beautiful? My mother with her frizzed hair and her asking eyes. I think of insisting to my childhood friends, and even in college, that they look at her wedding pictures and comment, tell me. Tell me she’s beautiful. Tell me, I demand, how pretty she looks. They never say it as firmly as I want to hear it. They never say it with conviction.
