Girlchild Read Online Free PDF Page B

while honor ’s reserved solely for the Honorable Joseph A. on The People’s Court , as in, “Your Honor , I was just try ing to get my wallet out to pay for the duty -free cigs when my gun went off,” but these words never ever show their faces together and much less inside a promise.
    No one on the Calle gives advice about things that I can find easy in the Handbook ’s index. Things I’d be too embarrassed to ask,
like what are all the points of a horse and how to make introductions without feeling awkward or embarrassed. I can hear all I want about sex, drugs, and rock’n’ roll on the playground, but only the Girl Scouts know the step-by-steps for limbering up a new book without injuring the binding and the how-tos of packing a suitcase to be a more efficient traveler. The only thing harder to come by around here than a suitcase is a brand-new book, but I keep the Girl Scout motto as close to my heart as the promise anyway: Be Prepared.

blocks that little girls are made of
    I ’m hanging by a thread, a hair. The fistful that is wrapped around Carol’s hand when she opens the door to the Hardware Man and pretends that we are playing a game. That’s how come Carol has that grip she has on me. She didn’t just twist me around her fingers once, she’s in my hair forever.
     
     
    When I have to stay at Carol’s house I stick to the edge of the mattress, wipe my nose with the sheet. Carol says I fall off the top bunk in the middle of the night but I know I don’t. I know Carol makes me sleep in her bed to save herself and I don’t hate her for it. That would be like hating my ownself. And anyway, it doesn’t work. Bad things happen but on the other side of the bed, and I cry soft as nothing and wipe my nose without moving or pulling the sheet or pillow.
     
     
    At my house it’s not all rosy either, but when she sits me at home, some nights Carol lets me stay up past bedtime if I promise not to tell, and I climb from chair to chair peeking through the curtains Grandma ran off on her old Singer, orange and yellow God’s Eyes embroidered along the seams. I’m watching for Mama’s shadow on the Calle. And when she does come sailing down our driveway,
sheets to the wind, I rush off to bed and pretend not to see her through slitted eyelids as she peeks in the door, pretend not to hear her whispered “Goodnight, girlchild. Goodnight.”
     
     
    But I never end up keeping these white secrets from Mama, because their light shines up all my other ones, shows how dirty the ones I keep, the ones I swear I’ll keep, really are. It starts with the gray one about not telling Mama that Carol leaves me alone with the Hardware Man so that she can be alone with Tony, and they just get darker from there. I can’t keep this little pretty lie for my own, I blurt it out the next morning, “I-stayed-up-past-bedtime,” and she’s not ever mad because when I say this then she can believe that’s it. I’ve told all there is to tell. Mama needs to believe in my truth-telling. That’s her little lie, that it’s possible to raise a child clean and safe without rows of secrets somewhere, shelved like the boxes of fuses and circuit breakers at the back of the Hardware Store, coiled like garden hoses forgotten until inventory time. And I need her to believe in this too so she won’t start doing an inventory of her own and ask about the places my bathing suit does or doesn’t go, the skin that burns pale underneath the Hardware Man’s hands.
     
     
    Carol was brought up by hands used to stripping rolls of wire and wrapping bundles of rope, hands more used to the feel of rubber-handled Vise-Grips and claw-headed hammers than little girl things. She didn’t have any time to unlearn that lesson before she was in charge of little bodies too like her own, their skin paling soft between summers and suntan lines. Maybe Carol’s memory flips like a light switch too and the things she learned and the things she does fall