One car pulled up and then another, then a few at once, and then they stopped coming. Only eight girls came. One-tenth of the invitations.
Mother was relieved, although she knew her daughter would be disappointed. Now Stepmother could come to the party. Now it wouldn’t be teenagers running everywhere and screaming too loudly. She and Stepmother came out of the kitchen to serve the pizza and cake together. It was exactly what Mother needed. The whole family was all together in one room. Stepmother pulled Mother onto the dance floor and they did a little jitterbug. Girl never asked for a party again.
brother moves to alaska
Brother and Girl stood in the garage smoking cigarettes before he caught his flight to move to Alaska. The garage was their space where parents never ventured. When Mother and Stepmother accepted that smoking was a vocation the children were quite fond of, they dragged an old couch in there and found the children a radio. There was only one bare bulb for light and the one window hadn’t been washed ever, so it was dim, brown-lit with the feeling that the ceiling was made of dust and cobwebs, even when the door was open. But yellow-brown light was warmer and more comforting than the clean white light of their house or school.
Girl was wearing her favorite earrings—wooden giraffes about an inch and a half long. She and Brother stood and smoked and tried not to talk about him leaving. Girl took off her right earring and held it in her closed hand so he wouldn’t see it. Girl loved these little giraffes so much—could she break the set? Would it even matter to him? Brother went inside for a moment, and Girl carefully pried off the hook, so it was just a wood statue. When he came back outside, Girl pressed it into his hands.
Brother put the giraffe into the pocket of his black leather jacket. He didn’t say anything, and Girl opened her mouth to stammer out an explanation of what she was trying to say with the giraffe. One look from him silenced her, though. Brother took off half of his slave bracelet—the chain had broken long ago between the yin-yang ring and the one on the silver wrist cuff, but he always wore them as if the chain still held them together. He kept the ring on his big finger but removed the wrist cuff and put it in her hands. Girl ran her thumb over the white and black stones and felt the crack in one of them with her thumbnail, then put it on her own wrist as their parents called the children to get in the car.
Sixteen was a bad year for Girl. Her brother was gone and Stepmother was on mental-health disability, so she was home every day after school while Mother was at work. Girl was going to visit Brother and Father in Alaska for a week. Her father had a new wife, #Six, and Girl liked her. She had even told #Six about the weird sex abuse stuff with her father.
There was that time in the bathtub with Dad that got a little weird, when he asked Girl, “Where’s the penis?” And maybe let her poke it. Maybe not. She wasn’t clear on what exactly happened, just that she felt squirmy inside and dirty and bad when she thought about that day. She did remember clearly the time Father and #Four had sex while the children giggled and peeked, and how he invited them into bed for a family snuggle afterward. There were all the dirty jokes he told Girl in grade school and the way he didn’t make the joke about “a blond” but instead about Girl or her sister Juli, and how she felt soiled by his laughter. There was the way he sat on her bed when she lived with him in high school and made small talk while she got dressed for school without averting his gaze, or the fact that he walked around completely naked, and that Girl knew all of his mistresses by name. There were the limericks and songs he taught Girl and Brother, the naked mermaid on his cribbage board, and the mug shaped like a breast with a drinking hole in the nipple. The photograph he took of Brother on the toilet that made Brother cry. But Father never touched Girl.
“Covert sexual abuse,” Girl’s counselor informed her: an inappropriately sexual relationship between parent and child. Lack of appropriate boundaries. She told Girl that it didn’t have to be worse than that. That alone counted as abuse, even if he never touched her. Girl wanted to believe her, but she wasn’t sure she could.
In tenth grade Girl told her biology teacher in high school that her father raped her, knowing it was a lie. She hadn’t meant to say it; it just came out when the teacher kept her after class for not turning in an assignment. Girl was crying. She didn’t know why she said it. She knew it wasn’t true, and she knew she was betraying every girl that had been raped, but she didn’t know how to take the words back. She didn’t know how to say that there was something fucked up and wrong about her father that scared her and made her feel dirty, but she didn’t know what it was. She
