Leslie’s father, Darryl, is silent and stone-chested, a Stetson shadowing his head. He’s hungry for Hamburger Helper and Miller beer after a hard day at the Standard Station he owns. Leslie sulks like a puppy dog, then quick grabs my hand to play upstairs.
Leslie has the best toys. She opens her closet and reveals the Fisher Price castle that opens up clean with a dragon and a queen. She has the airport, the farm. She has new badminton racquets and Stretch Armstrong.
We play between her twin princess beds, each made up with pink and white polka-dot bedspreads. A night table holds miniature plastic horses perfectly posed to trot off into my fantasy.
The toys at my house are all second-hand. Culled from flea markets where you stuff everything you can in a brown paper grocery bag and pay only $1. Out of those grocery bags come baby dolls, frizzy-haired, naked, with pen and crayon markings scarred across their faces, refugees in our house of pain. I don’t play with them. But I do play with the puzzles, pieces missing. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, limping. I play with the Spirograph, the Battling Tops.
“Don’t put that that top in your mouth,” my mother warns me. “You don’t Mom asks me if I want to leave the second grade at Heatherwood Elementary now and attend Arapahoe Elementary even though the water won’t be turned on at the new house in Shannon Estates for a couple of weeks. I nod in silence that I want to go because I want to get away from the two six-grader girls that sit behind me on the school bus and are always pulling down the hat on my coat and telling me how greasy my hair is.
The six Straubs pull up to a subdivision carved out of a cornfield eight miles east of Boulder on Arapahoe Road. In front of it there’s a big weedy lot Mom says is supposed to be a park someday. We pull up to our new house at 1388 Kilkenny St.
“Here it is kids,” Mom says, and we all pile out of the blue Dodge. It’s small three-bedroom yellow brick ranch with a basement. We go in the door, see the kitchen first, then we skip to the living room.
“Echo! Echo! Echo!” shouts Jeanie and I join in. We clap our hands. “Echo! Echo!” We can’t believe the clear white walls, the emptiness, the quiet.
I roll around on the red and orange shag carpet. Space. Untouched. But Mom is already hauling in shopping bags full of the junk she brought with her from the Gunbarrel apartments, filling up the corners, deadening the sound.
“I hate this stupid entrance,” Mom says. “What kind of a house do you enter and look at the kitchen?”
Little by little, the vast empty space closes down. It’s soon filled with mismatched broken-down furniture, garage sale clothes and dirty appliances. While she’s hauling in all that junk, I’m outside, seven years old, digging for China in the barren dirt of our backyard.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see there is a little girl, standing on her fine green carpet, the instant kind of grass that comes in expensive rolls on a flatbed truck. She’s staring at me. I don’t want to look at her. I’ve got to dig because I’m going to find treasure.
By the time I go in she’s gone, and my mother has already loudly introduced herself to the neighbors next door and she comes back to tell me. “Her name is Leslie and she’s your age,” she says. “Why don’t you go play with her?” I shrug and go out front.
Leslie has thin, dirty-blond hair to her shoulders, lead-penciled freckles on her cheeks and two buckteeth that are like barn doors swinging open. She wears the nice shirt with a little alligator over her heart. I wear a green dress and over my heart is a clumsily hand-embroidered flower of yellow yarn to cover the prior owner’s grease stain.
I soon discover that Leslie has everything that I don’t have.
Her mother, Marilyn, a skinny, young, pretty lady in blue jeans and orange-painted nails who listens to Elvis on eight-track tapes. Not like my mother, who’s old and wrinkly with a fat belly that seems plugged by a stone fetus stuck inside her. My mother’s hair is stringy and she doesn’t wash it much and never goes to the beauty parlor. She wears garage sale clothing and listens to bagpipers or some lady Marlene Dietrich singing in German.
Leslie’s mother stirs a glass pitcher full of Kool-Aid, raspberry, cherry, lime. She keeps a cupboard full of Kix for kids and a clean house with a living room nobody lives in, sofas nobody sits in. There’s a wall lined with Windexed, checkered mirrors, and downstairs a family room with Little House on the Prairie on TV.
At my house my mother stirs up powdered milk to put on our puffed rice. The furniture is covered with tattered fabric remnants from So Fro Fabrics. My mother doesn’t clean the house, so when it gets real dirty she screams at Nancy and Albert to clean it up. My father, usually with a migraine headache, sleeps in a darkened bedroom or talks to people in Dutch on a Ham radio. WB0CJH.
know what dirty hippy had that last.”
Leslie has a suitcase full of Barbie doll clothes. It bursts open when the latches snap back. My heart leaps. There are some outfits for Ken, five hundred for Barbie. It is a treasure chest and I am a pirate.
My small, second-grade hands cascade over the jewels of satin and plastic-sequined Barbie couture. My right hand waves over a plaid vest with golden buttons, so small, so perfect. It disappears in my fist. Hold tight. Out of Leslie’s sight. I stare at the floor.
“I have to go now. Good-bye.”
And I come home to my G.I. Joe, plucked from a garage sale. Some child ripped off his right leg at the knee and he’s missing one of his Kung Fu grips. But he has his shaggy beard, his scarred cheek. In my bedroom he is home from the war, at home with a harem of frizzy-haired Barbies with mismatched heads. I wonder why all the dolls’ hair frizzed up. A plastic sheen turned sponge scrubber.
I put the vest over G.I. Joe’s naked body. He is dressed. He is rich. To act out a thousand stories in the ruins of my deprivation.
“Patti, come practice your piano.” My mother waits for me at the old player piano for my lesson. She loves to play. I play because my mother makes me. We get free lessons from the music students at the university. I watch as my mother’s dentures click and she breathes heavy coffee breath and her crooked long fingers tickle the chipped ivory keys.
We bought the piano from some hippies in Boulder. I remember their house, wooden with peeling paint, somewhere downtown. Shirtless blond children rolling around on a ragged couch. The piano came home. Its heavy black wood blocked a window and sunlight struggled behind its rectangular silhouette. We opened up the piano. Among its old wooden guts and wires we found dozens of pennies, cigarette butts, a paperback of the Baghavad Gita, a copper bust bank of General Macarthur.
The keys give a dull thud when pressed. Mom called in a tuner, he was blind. He told her, “Throw it out.” But we didn’t. We played on it. I learned from Teaching Little Fingers To Play. “Here we go, up a row, to a birthday party. Dolly dear, sandman’s near you will soon be sleeping.” I played and I played because I was supposed to.
The next day Leslie rings the doorbell and asks if I can play.
“Come on in, Leslie,” my mother says. “She’s playing the piano.” My fingers go into my mouth as I dread Leslie seeing our house. I turn and see her, uncomfortable. Surely she sees the piles of clothing on the floor, the library discards, the saved elastic waistbands cut from men’s old underwear, the endless piles of paper scrawled with my mother’s poetry. She sits down next to me, and I, round-shouldered, begin to play. I continued to play and I straighten up. Then I begin improvising, banging on the keys, my fingers flying up and down the keyboard, my voice free. “Blah, blah blah. La Dee Da!.”
“That sounds stupid,” Leslie says.
I am frozen into silence and my stomach flutters to my throat. She is right. This hideous piano, my hideous home. Her suitcase full of store-bought Barbie doll clothes. Her fresh Kool-aid breath and green grass stains on her new white Nikes.
“Let’s go to my house to play,” she says. And we do.
The next day Leslie rings the doorbell again. I am happily reading my second grade books on Greek myths. She has a girlfriend, Chris, white-blond hair and one year older.
“Do you want to come and play?” they carry a baseball and bat.
I’d rather read my myths.
“Don’t be such a stick in the mud. Go out and play,” my mother tells me. So I do, with my fingers in my mouth and my head down. Out to the street. They assign teams, them against me and Leslie’s five-year-old sister, Kristin.
They are first to bat. I pitch. They always hit the ball skipping past me, past the baby sister, and I am running, running up the street after it. They score again and again and again and again. I am silent, fingers in my mouth, holding the storm inside my heart, wanting to rain tears. Again and again I chase the ball. Finally I can take no more. As the ball tears past me across the asphalt I turn away holding my torture inside and walk straight home.
“Did you have fun?” my mother asks, not looking up from her book. I hide in the bathroom and only there do I cry silently, hiccupping in shame.
Still Leslie and Chris ring the doorbell another day. And still my mother tells me to go out.
“Let’s play house,” they say.
“OK,” I say. “You can be the mother, I can be the father, and you can be the baby.”
“Did you hear that, Leslie?” Chris rolls her eyes. “She said you can be the baby.
Again doubt and fear strangle my heart.
“No, no, I didn’t mean …”
“She called you a baby.” They are right. I am wrong.
Still they ring the doorbell. We play four square in the street with Leslie’s big round ball. They do choppers and the ball spins past me. I run to chase it and an old woman talking a walk picks it up and hands it to me.
“Here you go, pretty girl,” she says.
I go back to the game. I start the ball. Leslie catches it and holds on to it. She points right at me and sneers.
“You’re ugly. She’s pretty,” and points to Chris. She has to be right. Leslie’s the one with tulips, red, yellow, pink, blooming in her front yard. All we have are Chinese elms coming up wild. That night I sneak to Leslie’s yard. I snap a red velvety tulip and leave a hollow half stem. I put it on the piano. My mother doesn’t notice.
It is on the school bus that Chris decides to start calling me “Patty fatty, Patty fatty.” Every day. “Patty fatty. Patty fatty.” And the children laugh and my cheeks burn. I cry. I cry all the way home. My mother is playing the piano. She stops after a while and asks what’s wrong. I blubber it out to her. She says nothing, just clicks her false teeth and narrows her eyes.
The next day after school I get off the bus. My mother is waiting for me. Instead of greeting me, she turns to Chris, and pulls her aside.
“Chris piss, Chris piss,” my mother hisses at her. “Chris piss, how does it feel little girl?” Chris bursts into tears and starts walking quickly away. My mother follows. “Chris piss, Chris piss, don’t you ever call my daughter names again you dirty little dog.” I am so embarrassed and race past them all, race home to my room to cry. The next day somebody from the Social Services comes by to talk to my mother. Leslie and Chris don’t come around for a long time.
My mother buys a camper at a garage sale and my dad and brother Albert load it onto the back of our yellow Chevy truck. It’s a tiny fishing hut. Dead flies line the windows that smell like metal. The cushions are itchy brown and there are orange, scratchy curtains. I am sweeping it out, getting ready for a camping trip, when Leslie and Chris appear.
“Hey, you want to play camping?” Leslie asks. I shrug.
Chris and Leslie decide they want to play house and cook on the stove. They bring in green grass, ripping it from her lush lawn, stuffing it under the metal burners. They play, I watch in silence, broom in hand. They bring more and more grass in, covering the whole stove, spilling it on the floor.
“LESLIE! It’s time to eat!” I hear Leslie’s mother call from a window. Albert steps up to the door and sees the mess. Albert, tall, who is under the hood of a VW with the four Campbell boys down Kilkenny Street, or taking apart radios and putting them back together again. Albert, who Mom cuts his bushy brown hair too short and makes him wear dorky K-mart shoes and is teased at school. Kids throw his homework papers all over the street and he just walks on, red-cheeked. Albert, who cries quietly at the edge of his bed but comes out of his room red-faced and tight-jawed ready to punch something, anything. Albert who chops up wood that is starting to rot in the backyard, sets fire to the Kleenex in Mom’s skull ashtray that says ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY, then when Mom is gone, chops up old dirty chairs and discarded books and burns them in the fireplace.
Albert looks at me. He looks at them playing. They start for the door.
“Hey, you better clean this up,” he says to them. Leslie’s mouth hangs open and stares at him.
“I have to go now. I have to go in and eat dinner,” she whimpers.
“You’re not leaving until every blade of grass is gone from here,” he says. Leslie and Chris look at each other.
“LESLIE! GET INSIDE. IT’S TIME TO EAT!” It’s her father calling now.
Leslie’s eyes round with fear. She and Chris franticly start plucking the grass out of the stove and into a box. They try and run.
“Clean it all up,” Albert snaps. They work faster.
“LESLIE! GET INSIDE THIS MINUTE! OR YOU KNOW WHAT’S COMING!” her father yells.
“I have to go!” Leslie is near tears.
“Clean it all up, you little shits.” My brother’s face is scarlet red and he’s blocking the door.
Finally it is all out. Chris jumps out of the camper and Leslie tears to the back of her house. I peer out the camper. I see her father, large, huffing with a heavy leather belt in his red hand, strolling fast toward the back of her house.
“LESLIE, WHAT DID I TELL YOU?” he roars.
I hear the whips. I hear Leslie wailing. I hear the whips. Again and again, heavy snapping on bare skin.
I go into my house. Again, I think, there is something that Leslie has that I don’t. And I am glad.
I go to the player piano. My mother is playing Mack the Knife. I sit next to her and listen, ignoring the bad notes. And I am glad.
Leslie has the best toys. She opens her closet and reveals the Fisher Price castle that opens up clean with a dragon and a queen. She has the airport, the farm. She has new badminton racquets and Stretch Armstrong.
We play between her twin princess beds, each made up with pink and white polka-dot bedspreads. A night table holds miniature plastic horses perfectly posed to trot off into my fantasy.
The toys at my house are all second-hand. Culled from flea markets where you stuff everything you can in a brown paper grocery bag and pay only $1. Out of those grocery bags come baby dolls, frizzy-haired, naked, with pen and crayon markings scarred across their faces, refugees in our house of pain. I don’t play with them. But I do play with the puzzles, pieces missing. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, limping. I play with the Spirograph, the Battling Tops.
“Don’t put that that top in your mouth,” my mother warns me. “You don’t Mom asks me if I want to leave the second grade at Heatherwood Elementary now and attend Arapahoe Elementary even though the water won’t be turned on at the new house in Shannon Estates for a couple of weeks. I nod in silence that I want to go because I want to get away from the two six-grader girls that sit behind me on the school bus and are always pulling down the hat on my coat and telling me how greasy my hair is.
The six Straubs pull up to a subdivision carved out of a cornfield eight miles east of Boulder on Arapahoe Road. In front of it there’s a big weedy lot Mom says is supposed to be a park someday. We pull up to our new house at 1388 Kilkenny St.
“Here it is kids,” Mom says, and we all pile out of the blue Dodge. It’s small three-bedroom yellow brick ranch with a basement. We go in the door, see the kitchen first, then we skip to the living room.
“Echo! Echo! Echo!” shouts Jeanie and I join in. We clap our hands. “Echo! Echo!” We can’t believe the clear white walls, the emptiness, the quiet.
I roll around on the red and orange shag carpet. Space. Untouched. But Mom is already hauling in shopping bags full of the junk she brought with her from the Gunbarrel apartments, filling up the corners, deadening the sound.
“I hate this stupid entrance,” Mom says. “What kind of a house do you enter and look at the kitchen?”
Little by little, the vast empty space closes down. It’s soon filled with mismatched broken-down furniture, garage sale clothes and dirty appliances. While she’s hauling in all that junk, I’m outside, seven years old, digging for China in the barren dirt of our backyard.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see there is a little girl, standing on her fine green carpet, the instant kind of grass that comes in expensive rolls on a flatbed truck. She’s staring at me. I don’t want to look at her. I’ve got to dig because I’m going to find treasure.
By the time I go in she’s gone, and my mother has already loudly introduced herself to the neighbors next door and she comes back to tell me. “Her name is Leslie and she’s your age,” she says. “Why don’t you go play with her?” I shrug and go out front.
Leslie has thin, dirty-blond hair to her shoulders, lead-penciled freckles on her cheeks and two buckteeth that are like barn doors swinging open. She wears the nice shirt with a little alligator over her heart. I wear a green dress and over my heart is a clumsily hand-embroidered flower of yellow yarn to cover the prior owner’s grease stain.
I soon discover that Leslie has everything that I don’t have.
Her mother, Marilyn, a skinny, young, pretty lady in blue jeans and orange-painted nails who listens to Elvis on eight-track tapes. Not like my mother, who’s old and wrinkly with a fat belly that seems plugged by a stone fetus stuck inside her. My mother’s hair is stringy and she doesn’t wash it much and never goes to the beauty parlor. She wears garage sale clothing and listens to bagpipers or some lady Marlene Dietrich singing in German.
Leslie’s mother stirs a glass pitcher full of Kool-Aid, raspberry, cherry, lime. She keeps a cupboard full of Kix for kids and a clean house with a living room nobody lives in, sofas nobody sits in. There’s a wall lined with Windexed, checkered mirrors, and downstairs a family room with Little House on the Prairie on TV.
At my house my mother stirs up powdered milk to put on our puffed rice. The furniture is covered with tattered fabric remnants from So Fro Fabrics. My mother doesn’t clean the house, so when it gets real dirty she screams at Nancy and Albert to clean it up. My father, usually with a migraine headache, sleeps in a darkened bedroom or talks to people in Dutch on a Ham radio. WB0CJH.
know what dirty hippy had that last.”
Leslie has a suitcase full of Barbie doll clothes. It bursts open when the latches snap back. My heart leaps. There are some outfits for Ken, five hundred for Barbie. It is a treasure chest and I am a pirate.
My small, second-grade hands cascade over the jewels of satin and plastic-sequined Barbie couture. My right hand waves over a plaid vest with golden buttons, so small, so perfect. It disappears in my fist. Hold tight. Out of Leslie’s sight. I stare at the floor.
“I have to go now. Good-bye.”
And I come home to my G.I. Joe, plucked from a garage sale. Some child ripped off his right leg at the knee and he’s missing one of his Kung Fu grips. But he has his shaggy beard, his scarred cheek. In my bedroom he is home from the war, at home with a harem of frizzy-haired Barbies with mismatched heads. I wonder why all the dolls’ hair frizzed up. A plastic sheen turned sponge scrubber.
I put the vest over G.I. Joe’s naked body. He is dressed. He is rich. To act out a thousand stories in the ruins of my deprivation.
“Patti, come practice your piano.” My mother waits for me at the old player piano for my lesson. She loves to play. I play because my mother makes me. We get free lessons from the music students at the university. I watch as my mother’s dentures click and she breathes heavy coffee breath and her crooked long fingers tickle the chipped ivory keys.
We bought the piano from some hippies in Boulder. I remember their house, wooden with peeling paint, somewhere downtown. Shirtless blond children rolling around on a ragged couch. The piano came home. Its heavy black wood blocked a window and sunlight struggled behind its rectangular silhouette. We opened up the piano. Among its old wooden guts and wires we found dozens of pennies, cigarette butts, a paperback of the Baghavad Gita, a copper bust bank of General Macarthur.
The keys give a dull thud when pressed. Mom called in a tuner, he was blind. He told her, “Throw it out.” But we didn’t. We played on it. I learned from Teaching Little Fingers To Play. “Here we go, up a row, to a birthday party. Dolly dear, sandman’s near you will soon be sleeping.” I played and I played because I was supposed to.
The next day Leslie rings the doorbell and asks if I can play.
“Come on in, Leslie,” my mother says. “She’s playing the piano.” My fingers go into my mouth as I dread Leslie seeing our house. I turn and see her, uncomfortable. Surely she sees the piles of clothing on the floor, the library discards, the saved elastic waistbands cut from men’s old underwear, the endless piles of paper scrawled with my mother’s poetry. She sits down next to me, and I, round-shouldered, begin to play. I continued to play and I straighten up. Then I begin improvising, banging on the keys, my fingers flying up and down the keyboard, my voice free. “Blah, blah blah. La Dee Da!.”
“That sounds stupid,” Leslie says.
I am frozen into silence and my stomach flutters to my throat. She is right. This hideous piano, my hideous home. Her suitcase full of store-bought Barbie doll clothes. Her fresh Kool-aid breath and green grass stains on her new white Nikes.
“Let’s go to my house to play,” she says. And we do.
The next day Leslie rings the doorbell again. I am happily reading my second grade books on Greek myths. She has a girlfriend, Chris, white-blond hair and one year older.
“Do you want to come and play?” they carry a baseball and bat.
I’d rather read my myths.
“Don’t be such a stick in the mud. Go out and play,” my mother tells me. So I do, with my fingers in my mouth and my head down. Out to the street. They assign teams, them against me and Leslie’s five-year-old sister, Kristin.
They are first to bat. I pitch. They always hit the ball skipping past me, past the baby sister, and I am running, running up the street after it. They score again and again and again and again. I am silent, fingers in my mouth, holding the storm inside my heart, wanting to rain tears. Again and again I chase the ball. Finally I can take no more. As the ball tears past me across the asphalt I turn away holding my torture inside and walk straight home.
“Did you have fun?” my mother asks, not looking up from her book. I hide in the bathroom and only there do I cry silently, hiccupping in shame.
Still Leslie and Chris ring the doorbell another day. And still my mother tells me to go out.
“Let’s play house,” they say.
“OK,” I say. “You can be the mother, I can be the father, and you can be the baby.”
“Did you hear that, Leslie?” Chris rolls her eyes. “She said you can be the baby.
Again doubt and fear strangle my heart.
“No, no, I didn’t mean …”
“She called you a baby.” They are right. I am wrong.
Still they ring the doorbell. We play four square in the street with Leslie’s big round ball. They do choppers and the ball spins past me. I run to chase it and an old woman talking a walk picks it up and hands it to me.
“Here you go, pretty girl,” she says.
I go back to the game. I start the ball. Leslie catches it and holds on to it. She points right at me and sneers.
“You’re ugly. She’s pretty,” and points to Chris. She has to be right. Leslie’s the one with tulips, red, yellow, pink, blooming in her front yard. All we have are Chinese elms coming up wild. That night I sneak to Leslie’s yard. I snap a red velvety tulip and leave a hollow half stem. I put it on the piano. My mother doesn’t notice.
It is on the school bus that Chris decides to start calling me “Patty fatty, Patty fatty.” Every day. “Patty fatty. Patty fatty.” And the children laugh and my cheeks burn. I cry. I cry all the way home. My mother is playing the piano. She stops after a while and asks what’s wrong. I blubber it out to her. She says nothing, just clicks her false teeth and narrows her eyes.
The next day after school I get off the bus. My mother is waiting for me. Instead of greeting me, she turns to Chris, and pulls her aside.
“Chris piss, Chris piss,” my mother hisses at her. “Chris piss, how does it feel little girl?” Chris bursts into tears and starts walking quickly away. My mother follows. “Chris piss, Chris piss, don’t you ever call my daughter names again you dirty little dog.” I am so embarrassed and race past them all, race home to my room to cry. The next day somebody from the Social Services comes by to talk to my mother. Leslie and Chris don’t come around for a long time.
My mother buys a camper at a garage sale and my dad and brother Albert load it onto the back of our yellow Chevy truck. It’s a tiny fishing hut. Dead flies line the windows that smell like metal. The cushions are itchy brown and there are orange, scratchy curtains. I am sweeping it out, getting ready for a camping trip, when Leslie and Chris appear.
“Hey, you want to play camping?” Leslie asks. I shrug.
Chris and Leslie decide they want to play house and cook on the stove. They bring in green grass, ripping it from her lush lawn, stuffing it under the metal burners. They play, I watch in silence, broom in hand. They bring more and more grass in, covering the whole stove, spilling it on the floor.
“LESLIE! It’s time to eat!” I hear Leslie’s mother call from a window. Albert steps up to the door and sees the mess. Albert, tall, who is under the hood of a VW with the four Campbell boys down Kilkenny Street, or taking apart radios and putting them back together again. Albert, who Mom cuts his bushy brown hair too short and makes him wear dorky K-mart shoes and is teased at school. Kids throw his homework papers all over the street and he just walks on, red-cheeked. Albert, who cries quietly at the edge of his bed but comes out of his room red-faced and tight-jawed ready to punch something, anything. Albert who chops up wood that is starting to rot in the backyard, sets fire to the Kleenex in Mom’s skull ashtray that says ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY, then when Mom is gone, chops up old dirty chairs and discarded books and burns them in the fireplace.
Albert looks at me. He looks at them playing. They start for the door.
“Hey, you better clean this up,” he says to them. Leslie’s mouth hangs open and stares at him.
“I have to go now. I have to go in and eat dinner,” she whimpers.
“You’re not leaving until every blade of grass is gone from here,” he says. Leslie and Chris look at each other.
“LESLIE! GET INSIDE. IT’S TIME TO EAT!” It’s her father calling now.
Leslie’s eyes round with fear. She and Chris franticly start plucking the grass out of the stove and into a box. They try and run.
“Clean it all up,” Albert snaps. They work faster.
“LESLIE! GET INSIDE THIS MINUTE! OR YOU KNOW WHAT’S COMING!” her father yells.
“I have to go!” Leslie is near tears.
“Clean it all up, you little shits.” My brother’s face is scarlet red and he’s blocking the door.
Finally it is all out. Chris jumps out of the camper and Leslie tears to the back of her house. I peer out the camper. I see her father, large, huffing with a heavy leather belt in his red hand, strolling fast toward the back of her house.
“LESLIE, WHAT DID I TELL YOU?” he roars.
I hear the whips. I hear Leslie wailing. I hear the whips. Again and again, heavy snapping on bare skin.
I go into my house. Again, I think, there is something that Leslie has that I don’t. And I am glad.
I go to the player piano. My mother is playing Mack the Knife. I sit next to her and listen, ignoring the bad notes. And I am glad.
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