When I am not watching channels 590–595 in my parents’ bedroom, when I am not thinking about Monica Lewinsky and her wet cigar, when It hits, I’ve been returning to an airplane with the Wicked Witch of the West. I’m enjoying my flight, seat reclined, drinking an orange soda from a plastic cup, until the Wicked Witch tells me I’ve had enough. She pulls a piece of sharp metal from beneath my seat, some sort of necessary safety appliance, and she lifts my uniform school skirt, shoves the metal up between my legs. After that, she wraps a fresh diaper around these parts until the tape slices into my hips. I want to suck the mole off her face. The Witch opens the emergency door, as if to admire the view. She tells me to come, come, look out at the world, before she pushes me out of the plane and into the sky. I go soaring off into the bent horizon of blue, and eventually land in a field of sawgrass, ass first, the metal piece impaling me under my diaper, stabbing out my insides. It feels good. I spit up ribbons of red into the grass. The Wicked Witch tells me I’m a very sweet girl, that I’ve done a fine job. She rubs my back in small circles.
When my hands stop, when I yank my eyes open, it takes minutes to blink away the color green. I’m so sorry, I say, to no one in particular, waiting for that witch to die out with my ceiling full of stars.
One school night, during Our Game, Misty and I hear Lee click open the front door for her friend Paula. We stand at the top of the stairs to say Hello. Paula is the pretty-boy type, I think. Her parachute pants hang below the knobs of her hipbones, and she’s not wearing a bra. Go back in your room, says Lee. She is more stern than usual, more guarded about this friend. She takes Paula’s hand and leads her to the couch. She flicks off the lights. Go to bed, okay?
We go to our room. Ears up against the door. We want to know what Lee and Paula are talking about more than we’ve ever wanted anything. A few minutes go by before Misty says, Let’s get some ice cream. I like this excuse.
Yes, I say. I need it now.
We open our door and tiptoe down the stairs. Lee and Paula are still on the living room couch. Their limbs are interwoven like cat’s cradle strings. The television turns their skin deep purples and blues, though we cannot see what it is they are watching. What we see is Lee’s heart-shaped face on Paula’s shoulder, and then Paula’s hand on Lee’s head, and then a lift, a look, their two noses coming together, fingers rubbing the baby hairs around their ears. They kiss for a long while, and I think I must be dreaming. Misty’s eyes go wobbly with shine, and she jerks my hand, leading the way back up to her room.
Back to Our Game, she says. I want a French boy, in Paris. He’ll take me on his scooter and we’ll eat fancy bread and cheese and we’ll fuck slowly to a Brandy song.
During a fifth-grade field trip, our class goes to the movies. We see Forces of Nature, starring Ben Affleck, who is afraid of airplanes, and Sandra Bullock, who is much braver than that. I sit between Misty and Duke Freeman, who goes by Devilish Dukie, and my mother sits behind us as a chaperone (all the class moms take turns, but the kids like when it’s my mom; she’s the chillest, and she even let us watch a bootleg VHS of Titanic in our hotel room—naked scene and all—when we took a class trip to Disney). Duke looks like a Hanson brother. His lips are a deep pink, his hair like corn silk. I want any excuse to talk to Duke during the movie, so when Sandra and Ben are somewhere on the road, I reach over into Duke’s popcorn bag, lean into his ear, and ask, sincerely, May I go down on you?
Duke does not understand my request, but, somehow, my mother hears it.
After the movie, when we are back home, she tells me not to share popcorn anymore.
Popcorn, and Alanis Morissette, she says, are best enjoyed when you’re older.
I mention Paula and Lee the morning after we watched them from the stairs. What do you think they were doing? I ask Misty. Do you think Paula slept over?
I don’t think they were doing anything, she says.
We never got the ice cream, I say.
You watch too many movies, she says. You get confused.
I ask about the incident for weeks, almost every day, until Misty tells me to stop asking. I wrote my sister an e-mail about it, she says, just to make sure.
Did your sister write back?
They’re just friends, Misty says. Best friends.
Like us?
We never see Paula again, but from then on, when I write our love songs, I write them with Lee and Paula in mind. I want to live inside that feeling, fumble my way through it, the way Lee taught us. I think about that haircut, my craving for ice cream; their hands had such purpose. I think about the look just before the happening.
SHOW NAME
Uncle Whack isn’t really my uncle, and his hair isn’t really white. He bleaches it to look this way, shaves the sides of his head clean to get a stripe of skunkish Mohawk. He’s my real Uncle Kai’s best friend, and they are trying to get sober together; they are keeping their hands busy. Uncle Whack’s the one who rigged up the illegal satellite dish on our roof and the “black box” with an infinity of cable. He shoves playing cards into the box, sometimes a spent matchbook. This trips the system, he says, Abracadabra.
My two uncles like to hammer up on our roof while I’m trying to study Latin. They mow the lawn, scrub our water tanks. They pour jugs of chlorine and chemicals into our fountain out front until it looks carbonated. My mother is proud of her little brother and his friend. She knows they’re trying to be good, and clean from dope, which is something she also wants very badly for herself. When my uncles are not fixing up the house for cash, they’re making calls for my father. In our living room, all of them scream at people on the phone and sell stocks for someone named Jordan Belfort. This is something I won’t understand until the day I do.
My parents are leaving town again. So mega lucky, say the kids at school. Rich parents, all those vacays. Do you get back souvenirs? Pets? But I’m never really sure where they go. Last month, I know my father went to South Africa to visit my half brothers, who live in Johannesburg with their mother. I know this because my father got into some sort of trouble on the plane. Some men in suits decided that smoking in the sky is dangerous, a menace, and banned it just a few days before his nineteen-hour flight. At the fifth hour, my father snuck a smoke in the airplane bathroom with his head in the toilet, flushing every few seconds to suck the evidence down. He returned home with some stories about this incident, and a mousetrap-sized metal dulcimer for me.
What would you say to Uncle Whack taking care of you this week, huh? Does that sound like fun? Uncle Whack can take you to Blockbuster. I bet he’ll even watch you ride! My mother is using the voice she uses when she wants something. It climbs up and down octaves—a sing-song, composed, motherly pitch.
But where are you going now?
A romantic getaway, okay? Don’t worry about that, okay? We need mommy-daddy time. And next week, Daddy will take you to Vegas.
Okay.
I don’t want Uncle Whack to watch me ride horses. Riding is the only thing in the world that’s my own. I took my dad for a ride only once, in North Carolina, around my birthday in July. He slung his right leg over an Appaloosa named Trigger, hooked his Gucci leather loafers into the western stirrups, and let me adjust his heels. I led him up Smith Mountain in a winding trot. My father smoked with his lips while both hands gripped the saddle horn, which I found particularly impressive.
Son, he said. What do I do about, how do I go about, how do I—I forgot to wear underwear.