The Onion Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

us—Christy, the professor, and me—sitting in that old-fashioned drawing room of the professor’s that he uses as a study.
    People who’ve never read fairy tales, the professor said, have a harder time coping in life than the people who have. They don’t have access to all the lessons that can be learned from the journeys through the dark woods and the kindness of strangers treated decently, the knowledge that
can be gained from the company and example of Donkeyskins and cats wearing boots and steadfast tin soldiers. I’m not talking about in-your-face lessons, but more subtle ones. The kind that seep up from your subconscious and give you moral and humane structures for your life. That teach you how to prevail, and trust. And maybe even love.
    The people who missed out on them have to be re-storied in their adult lives.
    Maybe that’s what’s happening to me. Faithfully though I read them when I was a kid, and have kept reading them all my life, maybe I need to be re-storied again anyway. Because there’s something missing in my life, too. I don’t need Joe or anyone else to tell me that. I’ve always known it.
    I’m an onion girl, like in that song Holly Cole sings. And what I’m most afraid of is that if you peel back enough layers, there won’t be anything left of me at all. Everyone’ll know who I really am. The Broken Girl. The Hollow Girl.
    Maybe the stories can fill me up.
    So.
    Once upon a time …
    I try to move my right hand again. It’s like it doesn’t exist.
    I can’t imagine a life in which I can’t paint and draw.
    Once upon a time …
    I’m in the fairy tale where the girl gets hits by a car and then lies in the ICU ward of the hospital, waiting to die. Or at the very least, life as she knew it is over and everything is forever changed.
    I’m not sure I want to know how the story ends.
    Once upon a time …

Raylene
    TYSON, SUMMER 1969
    Pinky Miller’s about my best friend, so I guess that’s why I put up with her the way I do. I mean, she’s as like’ to get me into trouble as out of it and there’s no way around it. She’s pretty much a strollop, and not the sharpest tool in the shed neither, but she’s got a lot of heart. Always stood by me, leastways.
    Like the time we ended up at this tailgate party on the Sutherlands’ back forty. We were still in high school at the time, fifteen going on twenty, the pair of us. I was always small, but big in all the right places, if you know what I mean, and Pinky, well, you look up “statuesque” in the dictionary and you’d find her picture.
    We was popular with all the boys, but I never put out like she did. Back in those days my big brother Del’d have tore a strip off me if he ever heard I was letting anybody get past second base. He was always telling me I had to save myself for that special guy and we both knew who he was. The boys I dated didn’t mind. I gave a righteous hand job and there
was always Pinky, happy to oblige whoever I was with if her own fella got himself a little wore out, and they got wore out more often ’n not.
    Pinky’s been like that pretty much since we hit puberty. There were three things a girl had to live for, she’d tell me, men, money, and partying, and not necessarily in that order. “Think about it, Raylene,” she told me once, at a time when we might’ve been going to college if we’d had the grades, the interest, or the money. “You can’t have a party without men and the foldin’ green to buy the party favors, am I right? Now given my druthers, I’ll take a backwoods boy any day of the week, hung like a horse and ready to rock ’n’ roll. But for the finer things in life—and I’m talkin’ perfume and jewels and pretty party dresses here—give me some old fuck with a fat wallet. It’s just economics, you