Next door to Mother’s white trailer was a pretty yellow one. Girl wished their trailer was a real color, not just white. She wished the trailer park had a paved road instead of a gravel one, because she had to push the blue pedals of her Big Wheel extra hard to make it go, and sometimes the front wheel would spin but the rest of the three-wheeler wouldn’t move at all. In the yellow trailer next door lived two women with a couple of dogs—one nice black-and-white one and one mean-sounding German Shepherd that barked all the time. The neighbors also had a rabbit that hopped around the living room without a cage and chewed up their telephone wires.
When Girl’s family first moved in one of the neighbor ladies had come over to introduce herself.
“Hi,” she said, with a southern accent. It sounded like “haah” to Girl. “I just fried up some milkweed buds and thought I’d share,” the neighbor said.
“Uh, thank you,” Mother said, waiting for the woman with the sporty-short brown hair to leave before she threw out the cooked weeds. Honestly, some people were just too strange.
Girl liked when the woman in the yellow trailer let her pet the rabbit, but if Girl woke that lady up on a Saturday when she and Brother were swinging on their tire swing—man, could she yell. A year later Mother ran into this neighbor lady (who had since moved away) at a lesbian social. She asked Mother to dance and they wound up kissing, even though they both were living with different partners.
Mother went home and told Bonnie that very night that they were through, and she and the children moved into a little yellow two-bedroom house with bunk beds. Stepmother came over to the little yellow house shortly after Mother and the children moved in. Mother made lasagna, and everything was going fine until Girl threw up all over the table. Do you know what thrown-up lasagna looks like? Pretty much the same as a dish of lasagna after a few slices have been cut, when it’s goopy and unfurled, the noodles and ricotta swimming in an oily red sauce. Stepmother asked for seconds anyway, while Brother jumped up and down singing, “Stinky noodle! Stinky noodle!” over and over again. That second piece of lasagna won Mother over, and Stepmother moved her boxes of art supplies and clothing and musical instruments in, taking over the side of the bed closest to the door.
Girl and Brother were sent to a new school, Webster Montessori, where they had to sit still in little chairs, and Girl was told not to make her eights by stacking two circles on top of each other but instead to make the twist that was always so hard. They had to learn French and when the children talked too much or got out of their seats, the teacher would grab their earlobes and pull down hard, making them burn long after they were released from her grip.
“Teacher threw Billy’s shoes out the window today,” Girl told Mother on the ride home.
“Why would she do that?” Mother asked.
“Because he untied them during class. And there’s a dog outside that eats shoes.” One of the schoolchildren’s favorite ways to interrupt class was to untie their shoes, requiring the teacher to stop and retie them.
“Did she ever throw your shoes out the window?”
“Yeah, but the dog wasn’t there that day so she just pulled my ear.” Mother had no idea what Girl was talking about, but it sounded crazy.
Girl could tell Mother didn’t believe her, but it was true, exactly like she said. The teacher was mean and Girl missed Trinity Montessori, even if the director killed her baby. Girl thought that it didn’t make sense that nice people sometimes did worse things than mean people.
stepmother
Stepmother had become Mother’s same-sex life partner, or “wusband,” as she liked to call herself after they had their own private commitment ceremony in the woods. When Girl said “her parents,” she meant this woman and her mother. She never considered her father one of her real parents. He was just Father, who lived far away and had a new family. Although she visited him, he was mostly important for his absence. Day-to-day life was Girl, Brother, Mother, and Stepmother. She didn’t remember much of life before they became a family, just little snippets of things, but Girl did remember how happy she had been in the single-wide trailer before Stepmother came to live with them.
Girl remembered one nice woman Mother dated, who played the guitar and sang songs. She liked her a lot better than Stepmother, but that woman went into the hospital and died. It would be many years before Girl learned that this woman and Stepmother were the same person—the woman who went into the hospital to have a hysterectomy came out someone with a hormone imbalance that turned her into someone unrecognizable.
Girl didn’t care that her mother was gay—it was the way her mother had been for as long as she could remember. But everyone else made it a big deal. Girl cared that Stepmother was always yelling, and that Mother loved Stepmother best—more than she loved Girl and Brother, it seemed. Girl cared that Stepmother appeared to hate Brother and hit him all the time. Stepmother told Girl over and over that she loved her, but her words felt like nothing.
Stepmother was what they called “Baby Butch” back in the 1970s. This was the best kind of butch to be; tough and strong but with a cute face. In the lesbian world, she was a catch. Throughout her life, a lot of men asked Girl why lesbians were so ugly, by which they meant masculine, and if ugly women became lesbians because they couldn’t attract men. Men asked, “Have you ever noticed that most lesbians are women that men wouldn’t want
