Being a Girl - Salon.com - June 1999
The picture hung in a flat glass case that had long promised “Coming Attractions,” but sat empty once the Salvation Army moved into the abandoned theater. Somebody tried to scratch the words off, but they must have given up and only the C was half peeled away. Now, in place of a movie poster, Captain Rowan had tacked up a picture of Jesus. I recognized him from the statues at our church, St. Joseph’s, though he looked more like a nice, hippy Jesus than the stern, bloody savior I knew from the stations of the cross. This Jesus had a sweet smile and an untroubled face. His hand was out, palm upward. A group of beautiful children in foreign clothes stood in that hand, illuminated by a beam of golden light from the sun behind his head. I often stopped to stare at the picture as I passed beneath the empty marquee on my way home from first grade.
I was headed to our house, which was not a house at all, just the top half of a Laundromat, an apartment reached through a rickety, unmarked door at the back. Even the name of the place was wrong. We called it a laundroma, because the T no longer lit up in the sign that hung below our living room window.
Like everything else in that neighborhood, the place was strung-together, second-hand. Even the people were makeshift. The nice old man next door bought me birthday presents and let me to call him Grandpa Holt, though we were not related at all. It was fine. I had no real grandpa. They had both died years before I was born and I didn’t really miss them, not like I missed my father. The problem was, most everybody else had a dad. You only ran into them occasionally: snoring on the other side of a patched screen door, or pulling into the lot at Buck’s Tap, or, rarely, calling their kids to supper. Still, I wondered what it would feel like, calling someone “daddy,” sitting next to him in the pew on Sunday mornings at church, casually saying “Well, my dad thinks….”
What did he think? I had no idea.
Not having a dad—even a shadowy, scowling, mostly-gone dad—shamed me. It felt more serious than other things that set us apart, worse than living atop a laundry, uglier than our raggedy, pockmarked wooden door, more conspicuous than the cut-down fake fur coat I wore that winter. But I kept such thoughts to myself. Mom would hear none of it.
“Count your lucky stars, little girl,” she’d say, fists pounding a batch of overflowing dough back down into the bread bowl. “You’ve got the best kind of dad there is, one who leaves you well enough alone.”
Like ours, the Rowan’s house wasn’t whole either—it was attached at the side to the cobbled up theater—but it had a swing set and a fenced yard that kept us safe from the street. The closest thing we had to a yard was a gravel parking lot. Drunks from the tavern next door sometimes sped out of it late at night. I heard their spinning tires and rocks hitting the clapboard wall from our bedroom upstairs. Mom couldn’t send me off to play in a parking lot, and was relieved if I wandered to their place for a few hours.
“Just don’t talk to them about God or Jesus, and come straight home if they start asking you churchy kinds of questions,” she said at first, right after I met Robin Rowan at kindergarten. Mom worried about Protestants, said they looked down their noses at us Catholics. I worried too, just not about that.
Fire was the thing I feared most that year.
“You really have no proper fire escape here. Ma’am,” the man in the blue policeman outfit had told Mom. She had tried to shoo me away when he asked to speak to her, said he was from the fire inspector’s office. But I stuck right there, heard every word. Our apartment had only one way out, he said, and our bedroom sat right above a bank of dryers. A single spark, he said, could set those dryers alight, creating a wall of fire between us and the back door. “You need to determine an escape route, Ma’am. If I were you, I’d consider a new residence. This one is not currently safe.”
A wall of fire—I couldn’t stop picturing the tongues of flame pressing in on us. They had angry faces like in cartoons and legs to run after me. That’s why I lay in bed that night plotting escape. I was still doing it when Mom came to bed an hour later. I listened in the dark as she dropped her teeth into the cup of water, then added the fizzy tablet that bubbled and roiled like champagne on the Laurence Welk show.
“Mommy, how do you think we would get out? In a fire, I mean.”
“What are you doing still awake? My Lord. There’s not going to be any fire. I could just shoot that man for coming here. Let him find us another place we can afford—with room for the boys—on a bus route. As if I don’t have enough to think about right now. Go to sleep. It’s late. Don’t worry.”
But I did worry. Even on a regular night, there was plenty to keep me awake. I worried about Grandma dying, about Bernie, my hamster, biting Mom again. (Would she flush him down the toilet like she’d threatened?) Wandering the neighborhood, I spent a lot of time worrying about mean kids—big thick bodied boys and loud fourth grade girls—who always seemed about to catch me. Even though school now got in the way of watching “Dark Shadows,” I worried about vampires like Barnabas Collins. I worried about the year changing from 1968 to 1969—I really liked even years. So that night I lay in bed, picked my escape route, and followed it over and over in my head. I would make a rope of blankets like they did on TV. I’d climb right out our window, the one beside the bed, and drop to the roof of the tavern next door. Then I would run across that black tar roof and climb down the “Bucks” sign. That was how I’d do it. That was how I’d escape. I had it all figured out.
One day as I stood there alone staring up at the hippy Jesus, Captain Rowan was suddenly behind me, close enough that I could smell the coffee he’d been drinking.
“Isn’t that a wonderful picture?” he said, leaning down, hands on his knees so he was even closer. “It’s announcing our new girl’s club. We’ll call them Sunbeams, all the sweet little ones like you. Robin will be there, so will Regina. You’ll do crafts, put together shows, read stories. It will be a whole lot of fun,” he said as if he could already picture us sitting in a circle weaving potholders or piecing puzzles of landmarks in the holy land.
“Wouldn’t you like to be one of my little Sunbeams?”
Captain Rowan had never spoken directly to me before—he always seemed to have more important things to do—herding ladies to choir practice, collecting cast-off boots for the needy–so I didn’t know what to say to him. Robin Rowan and I were in Mrs. Smith’s class together, and we were always making up pretend clubs. But this was a real one, with a beautiful name, and a poster, and meetings. I was sure that my Mom wouldn’t want me anywhere near it.
“They’ll meet Thursdays, here at the Post. Wouldn’t you like that?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “But my Mom, I mean we’re Catholic.”
“Oh goodness me,” the Captain laughed, sound echoing from deep within the boxy blue jacket of his uniform. He was a minister, worse, a “holy roller” like Mom had warned me about. His uniform, though, with its golden loops and rows of medals, made him look more like a policeman, the fire inspector, or Captain Kangaroo, who I watched each morning before school. In my memory, Captain Rowan has no face at all, just a bowl haircut and that enormous jacket trimmed with braid.
“This is just a children’s club—not a church thing. It’s just like the Brownies or Bluebirds, of course without the fees and no camping or outdoor business. I’ll talk to your Mother, dear, explain all about it. I’m sure she’ll let you join us once she hears from me.”
I don’t know what Captain Rowan said to Mom, whether he called her “dear,” or put his hand on her shoulder, but she said she’d think about it. And when he offered to bring me home on the Salvation Army bus after the meetings, like he dropped all the other Sunbeams off, just to save her the trouble of walking that half block to get me, it was settled.
From then on, Captain Rowan almost always took me home last, after all the other girls left the rainbow painted bus. As he drove all over the West End he liked to have me sit on his lap where I could watch him turn the giant flat steering wheel to ease around corners. I should always smile, he’d tell me, show off my nice straight teeth. A pretty, smiling girl like me spread sunshine, he’d say, driving along with just one hand on the wheel. His other hand had already slipped up under the hem of my dress, eased beneath the elastic band of my cotton underpants.
“You are a good girl, a smart girl, one of my favorite girls,” he’d whisper into my ear as we drove slowly up Third Street. “ But you must never say anything to your Mommy about this, you know. You would be in very big trouble if she knew.”
“This is our secret, isn’t it? Just between you and me,” he’d say, his voice quiet and soft. I believed Captain Rowan. I would get in trouble if anyone knew how I sat on his knee as he drove the bus, his fat finger going in and out, in and out, his breath in my ear. It never hurt, what he did to me. And this was the most shameful part, that I liked it—that was the reason I could never tell anyone about the Captain’s hands. I stayed a Sunbeam, though, riding the bus every Thursday night, feeling put out if he picked another girl to drive with him instead of me, which happened sometimes. When it did, I couldn’t catch his eye at all. Those nights I sat by myself on the cool vinyl bench feeling invisible and lonesome.
I didn’t exactly like Captain Rowan, but I liked being chosen by him, being the girl picked for his lap, the one he watched and winked at and whispered to. This is how it must feel to have a father, I decided. If you had a dad, you might be chosen like that all the time.
And then, over the summer the Salvation Army pulled up and moved into an old funeral parlor downtown. The move took them nearer their people, the Captain had explained to Mom, those who truly needed help. The Rowans moved into an apartment upstairs there and Robin and her sisters transferred to another school.
I didn’t tell anyone about Captain Rowan and the rainbow bus for what seemed like a long time. Then one Saturday night, some months after he and his Salvation Army had moved on, Mom let me stay up with her past bedtime to watch “The Flower Drum Song.”
We lay on the nubby mauve couch that pressed little bumps into your cheek if you fell asleep on it accidentally. Cuddled beneath an old quilt, we listened as Nancy Kwan crooned to a many-mirrored reflection of herself.
“When men say I’m cute and funny,” she sang, “And my teeth aren’t teeth but pearl/I just lap it up like honey—/I enjoy being a girl.”
Mom’s hand was tucked at my side, and right then she looked down from the movie to pull two fingers from my mouth.
“Don’t. You’ll ruin your teeth,” she said. “I could never afford to fix them.”
And maybe that was it, the teeth that made me remember, as I fingered the slippery edge of my nightgown. I thought about Nancy Kwan’s perfect ones, how it would feel to be just like her, though surely I wasn’t anywhere close. I, too, adored being a girl–I wanted to sashay before that elaborately lit mirror in a room full of them singing about men who’d say I’m sweet as candy. I wanted to twirl myself around while Mom looked on, smiling. Hadn’t she always said that I was lucky, that my looks would save me? But even as I thought about it, my little tucked away piece of worry tumbled back out. Mom laughed then at something in the movie, and I knew she had no idea what kind of girl I was, not with her arm around me like that. It made me sad, I knew I had to come clean, had to tell her. My mind worked away at my dishonesty that way until the show ended. As we walked through the dark apartment to our room, I started talking.
I needed to tell her something, I said. Something really bad. She wasn’t listening so close until she saw that I was crying. And then I told her about Captain Rowan, how I had let him put his hands into my underwear–into me–how I knew that it was wrong but still I let him do it.
“Was it just that—just his fingers? Did he do anything else? Did he hurt you?”
“No,” I said, marveling that she didn’t seem so mad–at least not at me.
“You didn’t do anything bad,” Mom said, her hand brushing back my bangs, relief and gratitude rushing over me so fast it hardly registered. “He did the bad thing, he’s a grown man. I’m going to call them and turn him in. He’s in big trouble. Don’t ever think that this was your fault.”
When Mom told them, the Salvation Army people said there had been other complaints. The captain had been moved away from working with children, they told her. It would be okay now. I watched as she stood at the phone in the kitchen, her head shaking, brown eyes narrowing to tell me she wasn’t satisfied with their answers.
“At least he’s gone from here, at least we turned him in, “ she said after she hung up. “It’s dirty business, that’s for sure. They have some nerve, though, it was almost like they thought it was your fault, like we’re the ones who did something bad.”
They saw it, I knew then. They saw my guilt, even if Mom didn’t. Confession hadn’t cleaned away the stain, after all, which sat still tucked away inside. It stayed with me for years and I never quite shook a sense that I had gotten away with something.
Only a few months after that, just past Christmas, we moved away from the laundroma. We settled into a different neighborhood, different school, different apartment atop a fast-failing corner grocery. I wasn’t a Sunbeam anymore, but still I sometimes thought about the Captain, imagined how it would be to have a father, wondered if he was the bad person or if I was. And I went on worrying about fire and mean kids, though neither of them ever laid a finger on me.