Girls of a Certain Age Read online

  Flowers. The house fills with flowers.

  Age 24. You write a get-well-soon card to your aunt. The front is filled with lilacs. All of the cards in the pharmacy are either too funny or too morose. Maybe this is your future career path—the market for non-shitty get-well cards seems largely untapped. And what about cards for those who might never get well?

  Age 22. The boys are soft, warm weights. They are shots of hard liquor and the morning payback. They are carnival goldfish, shiny and forgetful, easily lost and won. They are songs performed live that make you sway, swoon, swell, that end with a chord you can’t play but they can, and you can feel it vibrate and echo through you. They are vampires, werewolves, things that appeared in the night to confess, convert, cry, come. They are moonlit shadows dancing on the wall, dark and featureless, versions of the truth. In the sunlight, always, they expand and disappear.

  Age 21. You got into this situation a little too quickly, a little too drunkenly. After, you pull the sheet up around your neck. “You embarrassed?” asks the brown-eyed boy who doesn’t know you well enough to know what you are, and who therefore shouldn’t comment. He pulls his pants up right in front of an open window.

  Your mother calls. Your aunt is not well.

  Age 19. Your first is finished so fast you never manage to take your shirt off, or maybe you won’t let him take your shirt off. They are too big, too pale, the space between them is too wide.

  Age 17. A boy puts his hand under your shirt. You stop breathing, your teeth start to chatter, but you don’t stop him. “What?” he says finally, leaning back. “You’ve never done this before?” You tell him you do it all the time. You tell him it’s as common as eating breakfast, and as boring. You tell him you’ve had these stupid things since you were twelve, and you’d trade them in a second for something better, like a bike.

  They often don’t feel as if they are yours in the first place. A drunken man with greasy hair and a yellow face standing near you on a dark subway platform picks up a piece of trash and examines it carefully, places it back on the ground, and then comes to touch you. In the dark there, alone, you don’t dare move or act human.

  Age 16. Your mom has a new pixie haircut. “It shows off all of my bad features,” she says again and again, feeling the edges with the palm of her hand. She seems always, that year, to be wielding a bottle of hair spray.

  “What are you wearing?” says your mother. “Wifebeater,” you say. “Excuse me?” she says. “Do you realize your bright pink bra is showing right through what, in my years, we called an incredibly small tank top?” Your father looks you over, wide-eyed, like he’s never met you before. “Uh-huh,” he says. “You be careful in that.”

  Age 15. Everyone at your lunch table buys a pink ribbon for fifty cents from a girl with a coffee can and too many clips in her hair. The quarters clink in coolly, one by one. No one looks at you.

  While your mom sleeps, you stand at her bedroom door and watch for the gentle rise and fall of her breath.

  Age 14. The house is like a florist’s shop, all flat surfaces overflowing with color and a sickeningly sweet scent. Your mom puts a vase of daisies on your bedside table. She doesn’t seem sick at all, but at first neither do flowers that have been cut off at the stem. The fridge fills with lasagna and chili, foiled baking dishes, plastic yogurt containers labeled with masking tape. Your father must have called everyone—family, friends, coworkers, maybe even people in the neighborhood who you have never met. The mantel is crowded with cards as it always is around birthdays, but these say “Get Well Soon” in thin, shiny cursive. Your father wanders around the house sniffing, touching petals, rubbing them sometimes to nothing between his pointer finger and thumb. “Look at all of this!” he keeps announcing to no one in particular. “Like a funeral,” you hear him mumble once.

  In newspaper and magazine articles things grow and spread like ______ and on every map there is a bold line marking the Tropic of ______ and the horoscopes say that for the crab called ______ not everything will go as planned.

  Your mom doesn’t miss much work, but she looks alien, eyebrowless and bald. Her toes are always numb. Sometimes she wears an itchy wig or a blue flowered hat she’s borrowed from you. When she opens her mouth to speak, you see it like a black pit in the cold earth. “You know I’m going to be okay?” she says. You nod, but you don’t know anything.

  Age 13. Thirteen isn’t like the movies or those books for girls—you have no craving to bleed from your most private organ, you don’t want to go bra shopping with your mother or, God forbid, talk about it at all, you have no need for what is growing on you; all they do is get in the way of headstands, soccer, walking home from school in the afternoon alone without getting looked at. But you don’t yet think they can be bearers of anything worse.

  Age 12. For over a decade there is no “them” to notice, until one day you follow some boy’s unguarded gaze, and you find them there, foreign hills sprouting from your chest, appearing without your encouragement or consent, throwing you instantly into some stage of life you don’t want any part of.

  Age 8. A shirtless neighborhood boy pegs you with a water balloon. You try to tear the next balloon away from him so you can throw it at his shorts, but instead it breaks open, spraying you both. You always seem to make this kind of mistake, either holding on too tight or letting go too soon. “Come here,” your mother yells from the window. “Not. Appropriate,” she says when you’re by her side. You’ve been running up and down the street shirtless, just like the boys. You don’t see why it should be otherwise.

  Age 7. Leaves fall from the trees. Your aunt lifts you high above her head, and you lift your shirtless Barbie high above yours, as if you’re pretending that the Barbie is your niece or your child or the person you want to become.

  Age 0. You appear from the depths soft, naked. You are imperfect in ways no one knows. You are symmetrical: fingers, toes, lips, chest. Your cheeks are pink, your big-pupiled eyes are an alarming light gray. You are suddenly and automatically loved.

  –9 months. Your parents are newly married, unwrinkled, sweating, skin to skin, breast to breast. It is all determined now. No one has a say. The little Xs play their hand of cards. There: your ski jump nose. There: your muscled calves. There: your propensity for math. There: your thin, pale fingers. There, there, there.

  Pets Are for Rich Kids

  I had some sea monkeys once, but they weren’t real pets. I ordered them from a catalog where there was this cartoon drawing of them looking like mermaid-lizards, naked and pale as macaroni. They were standing on two flippered feet and had spines like roller coasters and crazy tails with paddles at the ends and three antennae that looked like giraffe horns.

  “BOWLFUL OF HAPPINESS” said the ad in all caps.

  “Bowlful of baloney,” said Ma from the stove, where she was sprinkling in the orange powder for the mac ’n’ cheese.

  Why is Ma always right? They weren’t even worth the shipping and handling. The sea monkeys were just a bunch of dumb specks, like the dots of i’s that fell out of a book or like pepper sprinkled on water. I set the stupid plastic aquarium on top of the microwave in the kitchen and forgot all about it, and after a while all the water was green and kind of fuzzy and the sea monkeys were all dead. They didn’t even care. That’s how you know when something isn’t worth being alive, if it doesn’t care if it’s dead.

  “You’re being very callous, Ashley,” said my friend Willa. We were at her house eating peanut butter cookies off giant pink napkins. Her dog, Lionel, a yellow Lab that Willa yapped about all the time, was licking crumbs up from all around my toes and making me giggle. Willa’s kitchen was all white and clean, like a hospital. You could probably perform surgery right there on her kitchen table, and at the end her ma would swoop in and clean up the blood with a Miracle Mop.

  Willa was thin and kind of floppy. She could stick her elbow out in the wrong direction, which she called double-jointed and I called gross. She always wore fancy ba
rrettes and tops with sequins and glitter, and I always wore T-shirts and black sneakers and my favorite pair of turquoise leggings with the hole in the knee.

  We were friends for three reasons: she was in my class, she lived three blocks away, and her ma, Ms. Mary, stayed home all day to clean and make snacks. Willa lived in a two-story redbrick house that her family had all to itself, plus there was a yard in the back with a fence so you couldn’t see the neighbors. Willa had about a million pets, a dog and two cats and a turtle named Captain Eric and a ton of guinea pigs that were always having babies, plus a rock graveyard that took up, like, a quarter of the yard, where her dad helped her bury all the dead ones. Ms. Mary was always wandering around the house with a lint roller wheeling up fur.

  “Very what?” I asked.

  “Callous,” said Willa, licking at her fingers and then wiping them on her skirt. “Like someone who doesn’t care about other people.”

  “They weren’t people—that’s the point,” I said. “They weren’t even monkeys. They were dots.”

  “Pets are important,” said Willa. “They teach kids about responsibility.” She’d collected a load of crumbs in her napkin and then dumped them all over the floor below the table. Lionel abandoned my feet to go clean up the mess.

  I made my napkin into a tunnel and poured all the crumbs right into my mouth. “Let’s go play in the basement,” I said.

  “Not yet,” said Willa. First she wanted to tell me all about how she was going to be a pescatarian, which is a vegetarian who doesn’t care about fish.

  I sighed inside myself and started folding my napkin into a cootie catcher. Willa loved to say “Not yet” and then force me to listen to all of the great things she was doing for animals, like not eating them or adopting them, while I was sitting around waiting to play with her basement toys.

  Willa’s basement had three metal shelves full of toys, and you couldn’t even get to half of them without a stepladder. The shelves were organized in rows of blue plastic bins with white rectangular labels on them that said what was inside, like LITTLEST PET SHOP, POLLY POCKET, BOARD GAMES, OUTDOOR TOYS, CRAFTS, BARBIES, and AMERICAN GIRL DOLLS. The only toy that I had that Willa didn’t was Creepy Crawlers, which is like an Easy-Bake Oven for bugs.

  “So say you’re a pescatarian,” I said to Willa, just to see what she’d say. “Could you eat Captain Eric?” I was opening and closing my cootie catcher with my fingers as fast as I could.

  “A turtle is an amphibian, Ashley,” Willa said, shaking her head seriously, like I’d missed some big important lesson in school. “You really need a pet,” she added. “It’s, like, not even right for a kid not to have one.” She had little cookie crumbs speckled all around her mouth, and I pictured Ms. Mary appearing to lint-roll them off. “Also,” Willa said, “I would never kill Captain Eric.”

  “You want to know about death?” I said with mystery in my voice. I snapped the cootie catcher shut.

  Willa shook her head no.

  “My dad was climbing Mount Everest,” I said, “and he just kind of fell off.”

  “That’s not what my mom said,” said Willa.

  “Who would know better: me or your mom?” I asked. I mean, he could’ve fallen off Mount Everest. That would explain why I hadn’t heard from him since he left.

  “I don’t know,” said Willa, squirming in her seat. “Then when was the funeral?”

  “We couldn’t find the body,” I said.

  Willa bit at the corner of her lip. “Let’s just go play,” she said.

  “Cool,” I said, and I hopped off the chair and led us into the basement.

  A few weeks later, Willa appeared on my stoop almost toppling over. She was holding a giant cage that covered the entire upper half of her body, so she looked like a robot with a bunch of dangly limbs. The cage had one of those upside-down water bottles in it, plus a guinea pig. She plopped the cage down on the scratchy welcome mat that had been a watermelon before all the color came off.

  I looked over Willa’s shoulder into the street, where Ms. Mary was smiling and waving at me from her car parked along the curb. Even when something was three blocks away, Ms. Mary always drove. She drove Willa to the bus stop at the end of the street and around the neighborhood for trick-or-treating, which seemed pretty dumb to me.

  “What’s this?” I asked. The guinea pig had crammed itself into a corner of the cage. He was white with a few blobs of brown and black that looked like accidents with a paint brush. He was so fuzzy you couldn’t see his face or legs. He reminded me of a giant wad of dust collected under the couch.

  Willa said that the sea monkeys had made me a victim of false advertising, plus it was important for kids to have pets. She was happy to give me the opportunity to take care of a pet myself. She told me this with a look on her face I’d seen before, at Pioneer Girls when she won a pink calculator watch for selling the most tins of popcorn, even though her parents had just bought them all.

  “Thanks,” I said. There was this weird feeling in my stomach, sort of happy and ill at the same time, like when you’re in the middle of eating too much cake. I wanted a pet, but suddenly I wasn’t sure how committed I was to learning about responsibility.

  “What are you going to name him?” Willa asked.

  “Tiger,” I said.

  Willa didn’t even crack a smile. “That’s condescending,” she said. “How would you feel if your parents named you, like, Dog or something?”

  “I’d feel fine,” I said. “Better than a name like Willa.”

  She looked down at the guinea pig like maybe she better take it back. “This is just one pet, Ashley,” she said finally. “Try and keep it alive.”

  When Ma got home from work she saw the guinea pig and said, “Jesus Christ.” Then she sighed real big and draped her blue Rite Aid vest over the back of the rocking chair and plopped down on the orange-red couch and turned on the six o’clock news so she could be up-to-date with what was happening in the world. We’d flipped the cushions because the one side was all ratty, and now they were darker than the rest of the couch, and also the arms were all sunken in like Ma’s cheeks because of her missing side teeth.

  Ma said I was going to return the guinea pig to Willa, but I banged all around the apartment in a rage and stomped back and forth in front of Peter Jennings, saying that it was important for kids to learn responsibility. She told me to be quiet or we’d get a call from Mr. S in the basement apartment. Ma was in a real mood ever since Dad left, but I wasn’t too distraught because he had finally sent me a postcard, a picture of a milkshake stand in the middle of a desert landscape. The stand was called Desert Dessert. On the back he wrote in giant capital letters, “HAD A MILKSHAKE HERE + THOUGHT OF YOU. I SWEAR THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE FOR MILES. YOURS, DADDY.” It wasn’t a lot of information, but I loved mail and also milkshakes. Life at home didn’t seem all that different without him—when he was around, he was always at work.

  Ma looked away from the news to stare me in the eyes and say, “I’m not lifting one finger to take care of it, just so you know. Not one finger.”

  It was a promise she kept. Tiger was a real pain. He was eating all of my money and also pooping on it. I had to clean his cage every week or else it would stink to high heaven, so I was always walking down to the pet shop on Glenmont to buy wood chips.

  The pet shop was squeezed between an alcohol store and a café with no name that made the whole block smell like bacon and coffee. I tried to get Willa to walk down there with me once, but she said she wasn’t allowed, which made me feel a little haughty, which is like with your nose in the air. Then again maybe Willa didn’t want to go because she didn’t need to, because her parents always drove her to the big pet store, because she never paid for anything herself, not the wood chips or the dog food or the little treasure boxes that popped open and closed in Captain Eric’s tank.

  Aleks with a k owned the pet store and he had a green parrot who flew around the place, and if you sneezed, the parrot wo
uld sneeze too, and Aleks would say, “Wait’ll you see what it does when you fart.” One time when I was in a bad mood, my dad and I walked over to the pet store and he asked Aleks if I could play with the rabbit, and Aleks let me, but that was a long time ago.

  Even though Aleks would sometimes give me a 10 percent discount for being a Loyal Customer, I still started to worry I’d run out of resources, especially when I heard Ma on the phone talking about how we didn’t have any money left. I heard this sometimes when I’d sneak out of my room for a midnight snack, and Ma would be sitting at the kitchen table in her thin black nightie and pink robe, twisted in the telephone cord like some spider had wound her up there and would have her for dinner later. She’d be saying stuff like “He’s hardly sent a dime” and “Men are bastards” and “Men are animals” and “Men suck you dry.” But later I’d scrub out the yellow tub with Comet or something and she’d give me another dollar.

  I tried to make Tiger run through a maze of VHS tapes, but he just lay around on the rug like a lump. I put a trail of food pellets through the maze, but Tiger still wouldn’t move, even when I poked him in the butt over and over, saying “Lazybones!” Finally I just took one of the tapes out of the maze and popped it in the VCR and forgot to put him in his cage, and later I found a bunch of poop under the couch, plus him asleep in a ball.