Girlchild (20 page)
HENDRIX, Johanna #310,788
MEDICAL HISTORY AND PHYSICAL EXAMINATION
There is a family history of tuberculosis. The mother was found to have a small spot in her lung but apparently no active tuberculosis. She was counseled in May 1971 at the Mental Health Service but she doesn’t feel that it benefited her much. She feels, in general, she is treating the children much better but that maybe this is “too late.” She is currently four months pregnant and does not intend to marry this baby’s father.
V. White:wr
11-27-72
“This is the year you don’t get pregnant,” Mama says, and even though there are presents wrapped on the table, I know this wish is her real gift to me, a chance at control, a chance at my own life. I was going to make a wish of my own, but hers burns so hot and bright over my fifteen candles that all I can do is blow them out, this wish she didn’t make for herself over her own fifteenth birthday
cake, or made but couldn’t keep. Maybe even made again the year she became pregnant with me, somehow deciding to hold on to me and leave behind the man who was my father.
cake, or made but couldn’t keep. Maybe even made again the year she became pregnant with me, somehow deciding to hold on to me and leave behind the man who was my father.
What she’ll leave. What will be mine. The list of things: furniture, papers, wedding ring. Mama can see her death coming early, the smoke rising over the ridge, the scar of TB on her lungs. Only poets, libertines, and poor people get TB, and the pure force of Mama’s birthday wish, the balls it takes to make a wish for someone else, right out loud in front of them, makes me think she might have some poetry in her soul after all. My brothers can have the other stuff she’s so anxious to leave behind. This is all I want to inherit.
A
pair of headlights appears at the entrance to the Calle and there is a woman on the street, but she cannot be my mama, even though she is tall and long-legged, even though she follows the route that leads to our house, the one that leads to me. Tonight this stranger blinks and steadies herself against the neons that shimmy and blur, blend against a pair of headlights twinkle-twinkling so far she barely wonders what they are, headlights that glitter a promise just beyond the Hardware Store.
pair of headlights appears at the entrance to the Calle and there is a woman on the street, but she cannot be my mama, even though she is tall and long-legged, even though she follows the route that leads to our house, the one that leads to me. Tonight this stranger blinks and steadies herself against the neons that shimmy and blur, blend against a pair of headlights twinkle-twinkling so far she barely wonders what they are, headlights that glitter a promise just beyond the Hardware Store.
The headlights grow larger and still with their own story to tell, their own anger and appetite. The woman walking Mama’s route has one more lane to go. The white lines glow brighter before her. She blinks down at them. These lines do not jumble up or play games. Their message is clear. She turns her head sharply in the direction of the light, grown too close too fast, wailing and white. She glares at the brightness and intimacy, opens her mouth. And then she flies.
There is screeching and the smell of burning rubber.
And Mama, because it is my mama, if it was a stranger it wouldn’t feel like this, like my own bones breaking, like my own good-bye I’m saying, comes down twenty feet away from the skid marks left by Stu Holman’s pickup truck on the pavement of the busiest curve on the Calle. Inside the cab, Stu’s hand slides against
metal and plastic. Inside the cab, Stu cannot find the door handle, doesn’t understand how to work the lock.
metal and plastic. Inside the cab, Stu cannot find the door handle, doesn’t understand how to work the lock.
The customers who appear in the windows and screen door of the Truck Stop pour onto the Calle like sticky fluid and watch Stu as he collapses on the bug-splattered grill of his truck, trying to breathe in the muggy air. Mosquitoes, moth wings, stick on the back of his jacket. Sounds begin to lap against the thickness in the air like a tide coming in, the sounds of quarreling, sobbing, the sound of beer glass shattering on asphalt, the sound of sirens.
I
f a pickup truck with
1/2
tank of gas driven by a man 0.02 under the legal limit enters the Calle at ¼ to last call while Mama drinks at the Truck Stop at a constant rate of speed until she’s reached
1/2
cocked and her money
1/2
spent, how long will it take for the news to reach me, sleeping, the television on?
f a pickup truck with
1/2
tank of gas driven by a man 0.02 under the legal limit enters the Calle at ¼ to last call while Mama drinks at the Truck Stop at a constant rate of speed until she’s reached
1/2
cocked and her money
1/2
spent, how long will it take for the news to reach me, sleeping, the television on?
(Show all of your work.)
a.
The dad has to sit 5 feet from the fulcrum.
The dad has to sit 5 feet from the fulcrum.
b.
Working together they can complete the job in 2.4 minutes.
Working together they can complete the job in 2.4 minutes.
c.
The basket contains 7 yellow onions.
The basket contains 7 yellow onions.
d.
It will take 2
1/3
candles to light her way home.
It will take 2
1/3
candles to light her way home.
I
’m sleeping when there is a knock on the door. It’s early, before five, and dark, but I turn off the TV and slide the door open because I can see by the pink rising over the hill beyond my window that it’s my brothers waiting outside. All of them. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix.
’m sleeping when there is a knock on the door. It’s early, before five, and dark, but I turn off the TV and slide the door open because I can see by the pink rising over the hill beyond my window that it’s my brothers waiting outside. All of them. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix.
I’m too young to know that this early, unexpected visit means Mama’s employee file has been opened and the entries under Who to Contact in Case of an Emergency have been read, to know there was a fight about who would ride in the ambulance and who would make the call. For once, I’m too young to see what’s coming and there’s no getting out of the way. My brothers are hours from where they live in the bright-lights-big-city that hardly casts a shadow on the Calle and so neither do they. One sentence later and it’s too late to not know why their rush, the breakneck speed to tell me the news themselves before I hear the eleven o’clock version on the Calle. One sentence later and it’s too late to be too young again.
It’s Ronnie who says it first, “Mama was in an accident, she was hit by a truck,” and my own scream surprises me. I don’t know that’s my voice filling the room until I feel Ronnie’s arms wrapping
around me, holding me, and the noise doesn’t stop even after Bob and Gene and Winston move in close. We hold each other on Mama’s patchwork carpet, grip a hand or a shoulder, but I scream for all of us because there are no other sounds.
around me, holding me, and the noise doesn’t stop even after Bob and Gene and Winston move in close. We hold each other on Mama’s patchwork carpet, grip a hand or a shoulder, but I scream for all of us because there are no other sounds.
J
ohanna Ruth Hendrix, 46, died Monday at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center.
ohanna Ruth Hendrix, 46, died Monday at Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center.
A native of Santa Cruz, Calif., she was born July 31, 1943, and had been a Reno resident for the past 11 years.
Mrs. Hendrix worked in the food service industry.
Surviving are her daughter, R.D. Hendrix, age 15; son, son, son, and son Hendrix, ages 24 to 30; father, John Gunthum, whereabouts unknown; mother, Shirley Crumb; and leagues of empty barstools and even emptier beer glasses.
Cremation will be at the Masonic Memorial Gardens Crematory, under direction of the Alan Sparks Memorial Cremation Society.
A memorial is being established with the Sun Valley Lions Club, P.O. Box 20068, Sun Valley 89431. A service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Saturday at the Truck Stop.
Bring casserole.
M
y brothers sit on lawn chairs and I park myself on the gravel in front of them, hide myself in the stubble of their five o’clock shadows and feel like the newest fifth wheel on the Calle, a whisper of my own capital
H
. We went to Hobee’s for breakfast, but they should have saved their money because we didn’t make a dent in the buffet. And now we’re sitting together in front of the Nobility trying to figure out what to do next. The gravel pokes my ass as I watch my four brothers, grown men already getting ready to say good-bye to their twenties, consider how to help me get my feet on the ground, a little sister they hardly know. Each has a wife, common law or otherwise, and already too many mouths to feed to offer to take me. I wouldn’t go with them anyway and maybe they know that, remember it from having made a choice like this themselves once and at a similar age, and that is why we talk around it. No one suggests my living with Grandma either. We all know that her Social Security check provides just enough to keep her poor without taking me on, even including what the Social Security office might see fit to provide by way of what they do not hesitate to call Surviving Child Benefits. I could go to Grandma’s and be her final burden. She wouldn’t complain but she knows, and we know, the time has come for me to get on with growing up. I don’t need my brothers and Grandma doesn’t need me. It’s the Calle or the highway, and so the first adult understanding between us begins with this: I’ll take care of myself. All
that remains is to figure out how to guarantee a minimum of interference on the part of the County. And how to say good-bye to Mama.
y brothers sit on lawn chairs and I park myself on the gravel in front of them, hide myself in the stubble of their five o’clock shadows and feel like the newest fifth wheel on the Calle, a whisper of my own capital
H
. We went to Hobee’s for breakfast, but they should have saved their money because we didn’t make a dent in the buffet. And now we’re sitting together in front of the Nobility trying to figure out what to do next. The gravel pokes my ass as I watch my four brothers, grown men already getting ready to say good-bye to their twenties, consider how to help me get my feet on the ground, a little sister they hardly know. Each has a wife, common law or otherwise, and already too many mouths to feed to offer to take me. I wouldn’t go with them anyway and maybe they know that, remember it from having made a choice like this themselves once and at a similar age, and that is why we talk around it. No one suggests my living with Grandma either. We all know that her Social Security check provides just enough to keep her poor without taking me on, even including what the Social Security office might see fit to provide by way of what they do not hesitate to call Surviving Child Benefits. I could go to Grandma’s and be her final burden. She wouldn’t complain but she knows, and we know, the time has come for me to get on with growing up. I don’t need my brothers and Grandma doesn’t need me. It’s the Calle or the highway, and so the first adult understanding between us begins with this: I’ll take care of myself. All
that remains is to figure out how to guarantee a minimum of interference on the part of the County. And how to say good-bye to Mama.
The first part is easy; we’ve been working around the County our whole lives. It won’t even take having the County look the other way, if we don’t ask them for anything, looking the other way is what they’ll do, and as soon as I’m sixteen, I’ll emancipate myself, which is County talk for become an adult on paper.
The second part is something new and takes a lot of cigarettes, smoked to the quick, to even begin to figure out. I watch them smoke and talk it out, talk her out, our late, great mama, figure out what our two versions of her have in common and what they don’t.
“I never really got in trouble for anything,” I say, and Gene says he did once, really caught it, “For smoking pot outside the house,” and Bob says, “For cussing around strangers.” The pot was before my time, when Mama was still kid enough to rock her shelves with Kerouac without needing to know just why she should. When she was still kid enough to send her own kids off to school with hair so long they got beat for it. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. Hendrix. The 4-H Club. My brothers grew up with too much beat and not enough rhythm in a house, an actual house, full of Buddhas and Nag Champa, prayer flags and peace signs. But our house, Mama’s and mine, has wheels and is kept so clean it’s always ready to roll, and except for the fading mint of Benson & Hedges the air is clear, and except for a beaded sign that decorates the top of our corkboard, the colors of its purple, gold, and black beads blending with the darkening shades of the electric bills pinned below, the sign that says AND THIS TOO SHALL PASS AWAY, nothing of that old house, nothing of that old Mama remains. The sign is right; when Mama came to Reno she left that life behind. If it weren’t for these few relics that make the Nobility different from the other trailers in our row, it would feel almost like my brothers and I
didn’t have the same mother at all except for, as the 4-H Club and I are discovering, her lenience, her lack of chores and penalties, and her fear. They remember her being afraid and not knowing of what, but I’m the only one who still feels her demands, her grip on my shoulders, her eyes brown and sharp as bottle glass, her voice telling me what she never told her boy children, saved instead for a girlchild.
didn’t have the same mother at all except for, as the 4-H Club and I are discovering, her lenience, her lack of chores and penalties, and her fear. They remember her being afraid and not knowing of what, but I’m the only one who still feels her demands, her grip on my shoulders, her eyes brown and sharp as bottle glass, her voice telling me what she never told her boy children, saved instead for a girlchild.
“Smoke follows beauty,” she liked to say, and their smoke burns through Mama’s life, climbs and ducks through her ups and downs, and it’s a pattern I recognize, so it must be our same mama after all, theirs and mine, share and share alike, but just when I think we’ve got her agreed on, the smoke turns quick, gathers, darkens, and folds itself into the shape of a man. Winston is making a list of who we need to call, and Grandma is calling Mama’s sisters from her trailer in California, and I say, “What about Grandpa Gun?” but once the name is said it blows back against the 4-H Club like thunder clapping, close enough to make me shiver, and numbers begin to rise automatically in my head. It’s Mama’s voice teaching, telling me to “count the number of seconds between the thunder and the lightning, that’s how close the danger is, girlchild.”
Thunderclaps, and I stop counting, and say a sound that is equal to the number of seconds since the light flashed jagged, since Grandpa appeared here in front of the Nobility double-wide where he’s never been allowed. The number is supposed to be equal to the number of miles away we are from the approaching storm, but I can tell from my brothers’ faces that we’re already in it and before I can stop myself, the next sounds I make slant up at the end, curl themselves into questions, and the smoke that has taken Grandpa’s shape swallows my questions back down into my still-open mouth, and settles itself across my lungs like the dark bands of asphalt that bind the Calle, and my brothers begin their talk about Gun, the myths and hazy truths, and the two versions of him there are too.
Ronnie says that Grandpa thought dress-up time was shoot-out time, but Gene throws in, for no reason at all that I can see, “Mama never was deaf in one ear, just pretending. He never touched us.” It’s all mixed-up, top and bottom, these stories of Grandpa and his daughters, what he did and didn’t do: pale skin during a moment of touch, four little girls surviving a shotgun shack, so like Mama’s little boys surviving the cabin on the ridge the night she tried to take them all down. I wonder how many of her words, screamed at air, were for him. How many of her warnings about pretty dresses and bathing suit string were said too strong to me because they were too late for her. And then it’s enough. Enough to start a sweat creeping across my back, to unspool the memory of seeing Grandpa once in real life, flesh and blood not smoke and mirrors, his pickup truck to pick me up after school. He said Grandma was “off somewheres,” that Mama needed him to get me. And he said I should call him Grandpa, his fingers on the steering wheel red from cold, calluses rising sharp and clear, the Braille of the working class. I could read his age from his hands, I could guess his trade, but his sins went silent as fingerprints and the lights on the Calle start to flicker and the insects begin their crawl, under the skin, trying to find a way out, they trail up my arms, push the hairs to stand at attention.
Grandpa Gunthum says he’s taking me to Kmart to buy me any doll I want, “No matter what anybody has to say about it,” and then, “up to ten dollars.” I’m standing in the toy aisle facing one way and the other, feeling stared at by this strange Grandpa and by the dolls, lined up for the taking. I’m wondering what it might have took for Grandma to send him to pick me up from school in her place, and feeling pressure in my thighs from not knowing how to pick a new doll or if I should pick one at all, and I twist my foot around my ankle and begin examining the patch on my pocket.
Grandpa wants to know why I’m taking so long, and I say that if I could hold the money myself it would help me decide, so he hands the bills over, and then I pick a doll quick and pay the checkout lady myself, trying to make sure Grandpa doesn’t think just because he bought me a doll it makes me his Holly Hobbie.
Grandpa wants to know why I’m taking so long, and I say that if I could hold the money myself it would help me decide, so he hands the bills over, and then I pick a doll quick and pay the checkout lady myself, trying to make sure Grandpa doesn’t think just because he bought me a doll it makes me his Holly Hobbie.
There were lots of things Mama never learned how to do and too many things she shouldn’t have had to learn, her future spun early like a knife-thrower’s wheel, the making and unmaking of a rotten-mouthed girl, the histories of a feebleminded daughter. Mama couldn’t see anything except what happened to her, her story spelled out over and over again. And I can’t see what happens in the shadows created by the Hardware Man, but those shadows mark that something was lost, and that’s how I know that Grandpa didn’t cast his shadow on me, because I can remember that day. But Mama couldn’t have believed it, and I finally understand why, why she couldn’t think her father might hold tighter to regret than he ever held her and would only try to push his way back into our lives for an afternoon in order to prove to himself that he could. For all my yelling against history, for all the spelling bee chances I’ve lost and the chances I might have left, when my mama’s life was decided, mine was too, at least in her eyes. She didn’t like coming home then and she won’t be coming home now, but at least I know why. All this time she thought that she hadn’t saved me the way she hadn’t been saved, but there’s more than one way to save a kid, and maybe my brothers just did it, by telling me about Grandpa Gun and the real reason Mama didn’t like coming home at night.
My brothers survived her craziest years in one piece and never got close enough to risk body or soul again. But you have to come home when someone dies, because blood is thicker than tar and all the scrubbing in the world won’t stop your good and bad blood flowing forever together through your veins, meeting in a rush at
corners, gathering force, and washing you back up on the Calle. Now they’ve done their duty by seeing if they’re needed, and I’ve done my duty by telling them they’re not. We’ve made our plans, for my survival, for my new life on the Calle. We’ve got a pack of lies to deal to the County, should they ever come knocking. The good brothers are rowing back home to the lives they somehow figured out how to make once the Ridge was behind them, and I hug them good-bye and stand under the awning to watch their taillights fade.
corners, gathering force, and washing you back up on the Calle. Now they’ve done their duty by seeing if they’re needed, and I’ve done my duty by telling them they’re not. We’ve made our plans, for my survival, for my new life on the Calle. We’ve got a pack of lies to deal to the County, should they ever come knocking. The good brothers are rowing back home to the lives they somehow figured out how to make once the Ridge was behind them, and I hug them good-bye and stand under the awning to watch their taillights fade.
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