She wanted to run away from home. By third grade she had learned to read and write cursive, and could multiply three-digit numbers and do long division. She figured that she had all the skills she needed to make her way in the world. She tried to save her allowance in a plastic sandwich bag hidden in the backyard shed, but she always gave in and unburied the bag of nickels and quarters hidden under the straw. She walked two blocks to the corner store to buy candy, which she ate quickly, as was the house rule: all candy must be consumed on the walk home and the wrapper thrown away outside. She looked at the empty wrapper in her hand and wished she could remember tasting the second Twix bar.
When she opened the side door to the house, she didn’t notice the smell of dog and dirty litter boxes. When the family got the second cat Girl promised to clean the cat box every week, but her resolve lasted only a few days. Stepmother always complained that the smell came up through the heat register and kept her from sleeping. This gave Girl a secret schadenfreude, though of course she didn’t know that word yet, only the feel of evil pleasure. She “pretended” to forget to change the litter as long as possible, just as she rubbed her dirty-socked feet on Stepmother’s pillow whenever she watched TV in her parents’ bedroom.
Girl vacillated between fear, longing, and rage, but she learned to suppress the rage as long as possible, so the fear and longing flowed into the space that rage used to occupy. She wanted to be good. She did not want to be anything like Stepmother. When Girl was small, she had a waffle-knit blue blanket with a satin edge. She brought it everywhere she went, dragging it behind her until it turned gray and the original baby blue was only visible deep in the weft. The waffle-knit devolved into mostly strings in a vague blanket shape, and the satin edge was frayed. “When are you going to get rid of that rag?” the teenaged girls who lived down the hill asked her. It was the same thing Stepmother was always asking. When Girl was four she summoned all her resolve and gave the blanket to Mother and told her to throw it away. Girl ran to her bedroom and threw herself on the bottom of the bunk bed she shared with Brother and cried facedown into her pillow so Mother wouldn’t know that she had changed her mind. Mother had been so proud of her for giving up bankie. Girl missed bankie for weeks, months, years. She thought it was gone forever, so there was no point in saying anything to Mother. Besides, then Mother would no longer be proud of what a big girl she was. That was the start of the longing.
Years later, Girl learned that Mother kept the blanket in a paper bag in the closet until Girl graduated high school. She was surprised that Mother was so sentimental—it wasn’t a side she had ever seen. And Girl was also secretly enraged to learn that her bankie was right there all along and she could have had that hole filled up inside her, if only she had asked.
The fear was as large as the longing. If Girl’s closet door was open, she had nightmares. If she knocked on her parents’ door, Stepmother would scream at her to go back to bed. She spent a lot of time awake in the dark.
At Father’s house, she had the same nightmare every year. It was a parade of people wearing white dust masks and floating by on a river of smoke. She didn’t know why it scared her so much, or why she dreamed it every summer. At Mother’s house her dreams were all different. She didn’t remember the plot lines when she woke up, but the feel of them would stay wrapped around her for days. Lingering terror lived in the tension of her small muscles, seeped into the marrow of her bones, and combined with all the real-world issues she worried about: bullies at school, nuclear war, getting lost in the grocery store, disappointing her mother, and of course Stepmother’s erratic rage.
mother
Mother met Father when he was still married to Sharon, his second wife, although Mother thought Sharon was his first. She didn’t know about Jackie until she and Father applied for their own marriage license. Father said his first was a marriage of convenience and barely counted. “She couldn’t get into medical school unless she was married, I couldn’t move out of my mother’s house until I was married. That’s all it was,” Father told her. At that point, it was too late for second thoughts. Mother was eight years younger than Father, with long black hair down to her waist, an hourglass figure that she wished was a little less padded, and clear hazel eyes. “Your father told me he had an open marriage with Sharon, but I refused to date him until he was separated,” Mother told Girl years later.
Juli, Sharon’s daughter and Girl’s half-sister, had a different story. “I remember when your mother first came around. ‘Dad’s got a new girlfriend,’ my mom said. And that woman was your mother,” Juli told Girl. Juli was eight years
