The Geography of Girlhood Read online

  when I scampered into his camper

  and ended up staying there,

  giving him things he was used to hunting for

  but never catching.

  Be it in the slow dance or the forest,

  Bobby likes to have flesh here and there.

  He likes bringing me into his garage

  and kissing me beside the kill.

  Give him an animal without its skin,

  or me without my underwear,

  and you’d have typical Bobby:

  his left hand resting on the flanks,

  his right not pausing until

  it was inside the body,

  until it had found for certain

  the meaning of tender.

  Meteor Shower

  Tonight, my dad calls me outside.

  At first I think he’s found out

  where I was last night

  or what I did,

  but all he wants to say is that

  tonight there’s a meteor shower,

  big bath of stars

  that comes once a century.

  I knock out a laugh of relief

  and we stand under the night sky

  which seems to be falling to pieces all around us.

  He pulls me close and says my little girl

  and for a moment

  it’s as if he knows

  that I’m not anymore.

  Bonjour, Tristesse

  I am flunking out of French

  and it’s not all ooh la la

  and oui, oui, oui,

  it’s pretty much all

  oh merde and au revoir.

  Here’s what I want to know:

  how am I supposed

  to speak a foreign tongue

  when I’ve never even seen

  another state?

  How am I supposed to know

  about everywhere else

  when I can barely even

  navigate my way

  around here?

  Good Girl

  For all her noise about how she hates it here,

  next year my sister is going to a college

  only two hours away.

  She just got accepted today

  so now she has her life mapped out

  so now she is a good girl

  leaving the rest of us

  to go bad.

  Winter

  Winter is upon us

  and ice is everywhere,

  especially in our living room

  where my dad and Susan sit

  barely speaking.

  Something has happened between them

  and I don’t know what it is

  but I can tell already

  it won’t melt away.

  Seasons come and seasons go

  and I’m going to have to say goodbye

  to another one.

  Gossip

  Sometimes I imagine I’m talking to my mother

  and when we’ve exhausted

  the secrets of other girls,

  I tell her the gossip of my own life:

  how Tara gave Bobby to me

  without even knowing it,

  how Jenny Arnold barely talks to me anymore,

  how there’s talk of putting Denise in an institution

  how I think I love Bobby but maybe

  it’s just that I can’t seem to stop thinking

  about Randall Faber’s final day in the rain.

  I imagine I’m talking to my mother

  and somehow it’s making it all better

  because she’s holding my hand

  as we sit together on the sofa,

  the dogs panting at our feet

  and some sweet thing

  burning in the oven.

  The Way Love Goes

  I wake up in the middle of the night

  to the sound of someone crying.

  I go into Spencer’s room

  and even though he’s fourteen

  and almost grown up

  I find him curled like a kitten

  in a ball at the end of his bed

  all soft and sweet and young.

  I ask him what’s wrong

  and he says our parents don’t like each other anymore.

  How do you know? I say and he says,

  Because your dad ate a steak for dinner

  and he didn’t even care that it made her cry.

  I try to tell him this is the way love goes,

  it is fluid like tides or weather,

  just when it seems like it’s going away,

  it comes back

  and even if it doesn’t, that’s okay.

  Finally he looks at me and says

  Is that the way it is with us?

  and I tell him he’s an idiot and a goofball

  and I will always be his stepsister

  and I will always love him

  and because it’s the only way I know

  I bring him my globe

  and say If you ever need me

  I’ll always be somewhere on this

  and I stroke his hair

  until he sleeps again.

  New Flames

  Two days before Denise burns her house down,

  I have a dream I’m hovering above the town.

  I see patches of snow on the land,

  I see our house and Denise just outside it

  one hand on her lighter,

  one foot out the door.

  I see my father,

  knee-deep in the sand

  of his half-finished garage

  and my stepmother,

  fleeing the kitchen,

  crackers growing stale in the cupboards,

  the cheese molding into hard curls

  like my hair in seventh grade.

  I see my father and Susan collide in the hallway,

  wrap around each other like vines.

  From up above the land

  I see them crawl and cycle

  towards the bedroom,

  Susan’s cheeks as red

  as the ointment

  she once slathered

  on my stepbrother’s scraped knee.

  They duck under a beam

  and they are lost to me.

  I am left hovering up above

  my own house,

  bits of hunger falling

  out of my hands,

  spinning to the ground and

  landing like ash on the snow.

  Things They Taught Me

  Like my mother,

  I want to stand still

  so I can run fast.

  Like my sister,

  I want to get smart

  so I can fail tests.

  I want to plant flowers

  so I can pull weeds.

  I want to make friends

  so I can have enemies

  I want to fall in love

  so I can break hearts.

  I want to learn stick shift

  so I can drive away from here.

  I want to learn to put things on paper

  just so I can watch them burn.

  I want to grow up

  so I can forget this.

  6

  the Wrong road Out of town

  Away

  After they take Denise away

  to the hospital

  and say it isn’t as bad

  as it sounds,

  I call Bobby.

  Come and get me, I say,

  and take me away from here,

  take me as far away

  as you can imagine

  going.

  Goody-Goody

  I may think I’m a badass

  but before I leave,

  I tape a note to the fridge.

  (Be home soon. Love, Penny)

  As the road ticks by beneath

  our secondhand tires,

  I berate myself:

  How can I be expected

  to go somewhere real

  and do something great an
d

  be someone wonderful

  if I’m still the kind of goody-goody

  who leaves a note?

  Fun

  I wake up and we’re on a highway

  one and a half states away

  from everyone I’ve ever known.

  Bobby makes a joke about

  how maybe we should

  rob a Quickie Mart for fun.

  I don’t answer, instead I think how

  I feel farther off the map of my life

  than I’ve ever felt.

  But wherever I am,

  I surely must be closer to my mother,

  at least that’s what I tell myself.

  The Hand of Kentucky

  I was the darling girl with chapped lips,

  the one wearing her mother’s shoes,

  savvy with drink.

  I was holding Bobby’s hand

  when his compass needle slid towards Kentucky

  like a thief in a dank-water town,

  the bluegrass, the racetrack

  too bright now for him to ignore.

  I’ve always loved Bobby despite my sister or myself,

  despite the smell of garbage around his house

  or the bad habits he can’t help bringing to bear.

  And now Kentucky is like a hand up my skirt,

  I can’t move towards it or away from it,

  I can’t say no to Bobby and

  his big fist of plans,

  so he hitches me in and locks the door tight,

  he knows we’ll drive until the tip

  of Kentucky is three fingers inside me,

  he knows that when we cross the state line

  Kentucky will have stunned me and won me.

  I’ll roll my head back against the seat

  and moan, the memory of my own hometown

  barely even matching

  the sweat around my knees.

  Rest Stop

  Bobby is peeing

  and I am looking at the cars fly by,

  picturing myself hitching a ride

  from a trucker

  or better yet,

  the Perfect Family.

  They could take me in

  and love me

  like I was their own

  until one day

  I’m grown and wise and tall

  and famous for saying smart things

  and then I could go back

  to my hometown

  and all the people I loved

  would be there

  alive and bright and well

  all the stars lined up

  in exact constellations

  the way they were made to be.

  Inside Lucky’s

  We stop at a roadside bar in Arizona

  because Bobby is the only person in the world

  who has gotten lost trying to find the Grand Canyon

  but once we’re inside,

  he forgets about asking directions

  and immediately he drinks too much

  and talks too much

  and the bartender pulls me aside

  and asks me if my parents know where I am.

  I realize I am on my way to becoming

  just another teenage runaway statistic

  and I am with a boy who thinks

  playing twenty U2 songs in a row on the jukebox

  makes him cool.

  If Jenny were here

  she’d say what would really be cool

  is to play Merle Haggard

  like the locals do.

  But I’m not with Jenny, I am with a boy

  who is making an ass of himself

  and I’m wondering why being here

  doesn’t feel like

  I ever dreamed it would.

  Sleepless in Arizona

  Watching Bobby, I realize

  the thing about a guy you’ve

  spent your whole life loving from afar

  is that even though he’s real

  you’ve really made most of him up.

  That’s probably why I hate Sleepless in Seattle.

  My stepmom thinks it’s romantic

  but what she doesn’t realize

  is that Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks

  have done so much fantasizing about each

  other

  that if they were in the real world,

  getting together would

  definitely be a disappointment.

  What if you were imagining Tom Cruise

  and you got Tom Hanks?

  Or what if you were imagining Tom Hanks

  and you got Tom Arnold?

  Say what you like, but here now,

  looking across the room at the boy

  I thought I so-called loved,

  I am living proof that

  a good imagination may be

  the best friend of loners

  but it is definitely

  the enemy of lovers.

  How My Mother Felt

  Sitting on a gin-soaked stool,

  watching the locals drink themselves silly

  I wonder if my mother ever felt the way I do:

  so proud of herself for getting away

  that she couldn’t understand

  why all she thought about

  was going back.

  I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

  As the eighteenth U2 song plays

  (we’ve heard this one twice now),

  Bobby sidles up to me

  and slurs, How about robbing that Quickie Mart?

  I stare at him. You’re joking.

  C’mon, Penny. He gives me a drunk smirk.

  Your sister would do it.

  Getaway Girl

  Head bowed, I’m on my knees

  in front of what feels like thousands.

  I’m being arrested for driving the getaway car,

  I’m telling my story a mile a minute.

  When I finally stand up and

  crawl into the cab of the waiting cop car,

  pieces of gravel cling to my kneecaps.

  I’m not nose-job beautiful

  but attractive enough to know

  people are looking my way;

  I’m no brain surgeon but I know enough

  to point the finger at Bobby,

  whose idea of dinner is a pint of peach schnapps,

  whose mouth had been wooing my collarbone

  all night, urgent as bees to a begonia.

  Bobby’s the one with the bright idea

  of robbing the Quick Western Grocery,

  Bobby’s the guy who got us to where we are now,

  some faraway county’s tin can police station.

  My fingertips are touched with black,

  I make my mark on a white card

  and on the forearm of Officer Ron,

  who I touch long enough to say,

  Can’t we talk?

  When he says no, there are traces of black

  along my cheeks and neck,

  places my fingers don’t remember touching.

  I sit there and try to imagine myself miles away

  from where the whole stink started,

  my knees so tired from kneeling

  that I forget the time when all they were good for

  was casually holding me upright

  and always pointing out the place

  my skirt should never touch.

  Right Where I Left Him

  C’mon, Penny. Snap out of it. Whadya say?

  My little imaginary Robbing-The-Quickie-Mart fantasy is

  over and Bobby’s still standing right where I left him,

  smirking away. You know your sister would do it.

  I’m not my sister, I say. I look at him standing there,

  and then I speak three words I never in my life thought

  I’d utter to Bobby Lanegan: Take me home.

  Huh? He stares at me.

  Right now.

  He burps. What’s gotten i
nto you?

  Some sense, I say and turn and walk to the door.

  When it opens, the light hits me in the face,

  giving me a little slap like the ones

  you sometimes see a mean mom giving her kid,

  a little slap that says some dark red dreams

  are meant not to sleep in for long

  and now is the time

  to wake out of this one.

  7

  the flanks of home

  Over Now

  Bobby doesn’t say much on the drive home

  which is okay.

  I can tell by the look on his face

  he knows like I do

  that our love, if you could even call it that,

  wasn’t meant to live long,

  it had a short lifespan from the start

  the way certain things do

  that are born one season

  and are dead by the next.

  Short Lifespan

  Premature and underweight, our love was born in

  winter.

  Once it was born, it grew up fast.

  It was crawling one day and walking the next,

  sucking a tit during breakfast, getting teeth by

  lunchtime.

  Pretty soon, it started sneaking out at night.

  The police would find it lying in someone’s yard,

  staring up at the stars.

  One day we left it with a sitter

  and when we got home, the sitter was gone

  and our love was in the living room,

  calling all its friends.

  The next day we took it to the doctor,

  who said it had a disease.

  It couldn’t live in a regular house,

  it could never have a normal life.

  Our love, he said, wouldn’t last the winter.

  It is spring now and our love has been laid to rest.

  Even though I’m advised against it

  I can’t help thinking about its short little life—

  how its first word was you and its last was me,

  how it would come home drunk after a dance,

  how it learned to swim in only an afternoon,

  how the two of us stood at the edge

  of the community pool, cheering it on,

  amazed that such a clumsy creature

  could even begin to float.

  Phone Call Home

  When we get to the ferry,

  I call my father.

  He doesn’t say much,

  just that he’ll pick me up