I press my cheek into the patent leather of his shoes. My mother has my father and I have Uncle Nuke. In the morning, I wear the red indents of his shoelaces across my face like a map.
I can’t bear the thought of leaving Uncle Nuke. Not for school, or for walks to Biscayne Bay; I don’t even like to leave whichever room he’s in. I, too, learn to work his joints. Before school, I twist off one of his hands, hiding it in my lunch box. I hold the hand as much as I can throughout my day, a horseshoe grip around the bulk of fingers.
What’s wrong with the kid? I’ve heard my father ask. She doesn’t get her weird from me.
She likes to hold him is all, says my mother. You know kids—you have two others. They like to hold on to things, don’t they?
Here is a memory that still comes to me: I am small, too small, thimble legs in a yellow dress. My parents are getting married tonight. There are steep steps in the lobby of the Omni Hotel, and I am expected to walk down these steps with grace, to flick flowers. My mother wears a Chinese wedding gown, a beaded headpiece like a bird of paradise. She says, You can do this. She smiles the biggest smile of her life. My grandfather is wearing his best cuff links, veiny green jade, proud at last. He walks me through the steps I will take, Count. You can count, right? Everyone will love you.
They do. I make my way down the stairs with Ohs and Ahs of delight, the pop of flashbulbs. The bastard child.
My parents seem very much in love. I am old enough to know that. They dance little steps, around in a square. They smear cake and lick it. My father’s lips part as he squeezes my mother by her waist, their slow song tickling the water in my glass, and I am jealous of the both of them.
At home, in the half-dark, I tell Uncle Nuke all about it.
I say, I guess we can keep him. If we have to.
PENCIL
A diary entry, age nine: If I were a pencil sharpener, I would be miserable and lonely. I would be a small blue pencil sharpener. My only friend would be the scissors, which are black. Sometimes, people put a yellow stick in my mouth and I have to bite until it gets sharp.
WHY YOU LIKE IT
I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive. What I wanted was my freckled cheeks printed on cheap paper, stapled at the ears, the flyers torn from telephone poles and the scales of palm trees, a sliver of my face left flapping in the wind. I wanted to be the diametric opposite of who I was; am. To get gone. I wanted limbs dangling from the lip of a trash compactor, found by a lone jogger who would cry at the sight of my ankles, my beaten blue knees with their warm fuzz of kiddie hair.
Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don’t show up dead. So long as they stay missing.
I am nine years old in 1997, and I read magazines. I clip out so many images and faces that the remaining paper looks skeletal, like the threads of a crumbling leaf. My favorite magazine is called TigerBeat, with lips so glossed on the cover the paper looks wet. The clippings line the perimeter of my room, scotch-taped around the edges, gleaming.
The magazines have girl parts inside and boys with shining chests and words that tell me how I should or should not act, how to make lifelong friends. This is how to make him wait; this is how to get crushed; this is how to line your panties.
Are you lonely?
Sure, I’m lonely, I write to myself, on the electric IBM Wheelwriter my Grandma Yukling gave to me. Grandma goes by Rose now, because her American co-workers at the bank told her it was easier to say. Rosebud—more memorable—they saw it in a movie once, and so she used it.
Grandma Yukling-Kam-Rosebud taught me to set the typewriter margins when she came and visited from Hawai?i. She told me to write an autobiography, because it’s a good thing—sometimes—to remember your life. Instead, I’ve been writing about a girl named Joni Baloney. Joni is exactly like me except she’s white and athletic and people tend to grope her. She’s bullied at school and chomps on sandwiches under an exotic, drooping tree. She can’t help her preference for baloney. In chapter 2, boys rip off her underwear at recess and take turns wearing the damp cotton over their heads, so Joni Baloney runs away, pantyless, and joins a traveling freak show, rocketing horses off high-dive boards. Joni wears bikinis and makes it big and that’s that. I can do things like that when I write—pluck any thread of want and weave a whole world.
I have a new favorite section of TigerBeat—the pen pal ads—because these kids seem lonely, too. The ads feature square blocks of photographed faces with little stories about each kid, a home address below the story. Anyone can send mail directly to the addresses, no parents necessary, a feature that will soon be discontinued.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a letter to the magazine with a picture of myself. I wanted to look wanted. I handed my father a cardboard camera and clenched my jaw so the marbles of my temples would show. I covered my braces with my lips. When we picked up the photos from the drugstore, I felt proud of the stillness in my eyes—the absolute focus. In most of the pictures my hair is slicked back, but even without hair, I am still a girl.
To the magazine I wrote, Hi Hello my name is T Kira but please DEAR GOD forget the T. I am obsessed with riding horses and I like to palm the tassels that hang from my grandmother’s drapes and yes I would like a real camera for Hanukkah and yes I would like an instrument, any instrument, for Christmas and yes I do like the smell of a gas pump but really what I would really, really love is a pen pal, yes, and Thank you. I promised to write back. I promised to keep secrets. I wrote many lists like this but only chose the best parts to send. Small, sweet facts. I spritzed the envelope with Cucumber Melon body spray, sprinkled glitter all over the wet bull’s-eye of sweet.
I see it in the checkout line at an East Boca convenience store. I’m at a Palmetto Park strip mall with my mother. My father is next door at the bar, but he doesn’t know that we know it. We’ll stop for groceries, my mother had said, picking me up from school, and check for your magazine. And let’s make a bet—will Daddy’s car be in the lot?
Daddy’s car is in every lot, or driveway, whenever we play this game. Whenever we come looking. It’s amazing, I think, really something, how my parents share this telepathic connection. A few months before the convenience store, my mother took one of my father’s golf clubs to his Jaguar. The cracks spread over the driver’s seat window until the glass went soft looking, like chiffon. Since then, I wonder why we continue playing the Bet Daddy’s Car Game.
My mother places cartons of juice on the rolling belt of the checkout line. Behind the black cage wire of the magazine rack, I see it. The dimpled smiles of the Hanson brothers; Leonardo DiCaprio, tugging down the V of his shirt; each Spice Girl lined up in a row. I yank it off the shelf and please, just imagine it, opening something this beautiful with your own face inside. Your own shape shining on real paper. You could trace me with a pencil if you wanted to.
I show my mother, and then the grocery clerk, and then my mother again. Look, look, it’s ME! My mother grabs all the issues off the shelf, but I tell her to put them back. People won’t see it if we buy them ALL. I hand her the one magazine.
You’re smart, she says, I’ll keep you. She pets the top of my head.
Can we go in the bar and show Daddy?
He’s busy, she says.
It’s true—he always was.