And of course this: my mostly female teachers seemed to like my father quite a lot. I watched them moon over him, and he was a lesson to me about what women ought to admire. When they praised me in his presence, their words redirected the compliments toward him. “She is a marvelous reader. You can tell she’s been raised to think critically.” Or: “She’s at the top of her class. It’s obvious she has a wonderful support system at home.”
You can’t take these things personally. My father puffed out his chest with pride, and the look he gave me as he received these adulations was payment beyond measure for my hard work.
As a reward for a good report card and as long as it wasn’t a full moon, he would take me to the drive-in movie theater. We got there early in order to find the ideal space in the center of the lot. Then, until the movie started, I was allowed to run back and forth over the rows of tarmac dunes constructed to raise the front ends of the cars to a proper viewing angle.
During the movie, we ate from a bag of popcorn on the console between us. Sometimes a young couple in the car next to us would steam up their windows, and I was embarrassed. But if my father noticed, he never let on.
So it was a simple matter to shut myself off from the mortification of witnessing the private acts that might be taking place everywhere around me.
*
Then it was the sixth grade and I was twelve and I had a best friend named Polly.
Once, we rode our bikes down to the lake. It was Worm Moon, so it must have been March, and we had gotten out of school early. The school always had late starts and early closings on the three days around a full moon. The purpose of the shortened hours was to give students plenty of time to travel to and from home without having to be caught outside while the sun was down—but Polly and I lived so close to the school that we could use those extra hours to adventure around town.
We pulled our bikes through a thicket of dense brush until we came to a little patch of beach that was unknown to anyone but us. In the summer we would have stripped off our clothes and dived into the murky water, but on this day there was a crispness to the air, and we pulled our jackets more tightly around us. We skimmed stones off the surface of the lake and spoke of many things, including Hondy Pilt, the slow boy in our class who only knew how to say a few words and spoke them in a loud, inarticulate voice, and Rosebush Lincoln, the girl who was rumored to have made him cry by cornering him in the boys’ bathroom and making him pull down his pants so she could examine his boy parts. Rosebush Lincoln was in training to be a doctor.
Petey Meechum was also under discussion. Our school had square dancing once a week, and he was the boy who asked us each to be his partner (Polly seven times and me five) more often than he asked any other girl. All the girls wanted to be his square dancing partner, so Polly and I were pleased about our prospects for young womanhood. Petey Meechum’s attentions told us we were on the right track, and they boded well for our futures.
“Do you think he writes about us in his diary?” asked Polly.
The “us” signified a political settlement. There had been some tension between Polly and me on this matter, and lately we had come to some vague truce by speaking about the boy’s affections as if they were directed in equal measure toward both of us rather than simply toward one or the other.
“Boys don’t keep diaries,” I said. I wasn’t sure if she had been joking. Polly was sometimes wry and sometimes frank.
“I know,” she said. “How come you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they don’t care to dwell on things. Or maybe they don’t need to write things down because they have naturally good memories.”
“I bet Petey has an excellent memory. My mother says he’s the marrying kind.”
“The marrying kind? How come?”
“I don’t know. She won’t say. I think it’s because he tucks his shirt in again every day after recess.”
We sat on the sand, our legs pulled to our chests, and laughed into our knees. On my right, where Polly couldn’t see, I traced my initials in the sand with my finger. Then I imposed PM over my initials and put two twigs in a cross over the top. When I stood up, I would have to remember to brush the whole thing out quickly with my sneaker before Polly saw, and if I did then the incantation would be complete.
I had brains, but I was plain-looking compared to Polly, who had powder-blue eyes and pretty blond hair she wore in a ponytail. Me, I had mud-colored eyes and common brown hair, which was never the right length. Right then it was just below my jawline, and it flipped up on the ends—not in a cute symmetrical way but rather with both sides pointing to the right, so that I looked like a cartoon character in a soft wind. Plus I was puny for my age, the smallest girl in my grade, and freckled, and I wore glasses that were too big and round for my face. The only way I was going to win Petey Meechum from Polly was through magic.
But my magic had no time to work, because just then there was a voice behind us.
“You girls!”
We leaped to our feet and saw, emerging from the brush, the large shape of Hermit Weaper, whose cabin was on the other side of the lake past where the road lost its tarmac and became two rutted rows of bare earth in the weeds.
“You girls!” he said again and pointed his finger at us.
We ran for our bikes and began tugging them through the thick underbrush toward the road. He followed us, finger pointing, his craggy face twisted into a furious jack-o’-lantern, spittle launching from between his dried lips, hanging in strings from his chin.
“You get on out of here!” he called after us as we struggled toward the road. We moved as fast as we could, but he followed us still, lurching his way below low-hanging branches. His left leg was crippled by some ancient injury, but to us that simply made his pursuit all the more monstrous—his lumbering sideways lope through the trees.