My life as a girl came to an abrupt halt at the age of one and a half, when I suddenly outgrew all of my sister’s old clothes. Trying to shove my head into one of the frilly bonnets my mother had sewn, my father quickly concluded, was like attempting to stuff a watermelon through a keyhole. No matter which way he tugged, how much he heaved and pulled, the bonnet strings would not tie. The bonnet would not even cover half of my red scalp.
My father stepped back and examined me. Whereas Serena Jane possessed the limbs and features of a vain little pixie, my physiognomy brought to mind the heaviest and roundest of objects—a cannonball, perhaps. Something impervious to smashes and collisions. Since I began walking at the unprecedented age of seven months, I had fallen down the stairs twice, plunged unharmed into the flower beds from the front porch, and survived being pushed into oncoming traffic by Serena Jane in our rusted red wagon.
After each disaster, my father patiently checked me for signs of concussion, broken bones, or ravaged flesh but observed nothing. I never had any welts or bruises—I never even cried. In fact, the only way he ever even knew about any of my early calamities was the unholy noise I made when I fell. It was, he told his customers in the barbershop, like an asteroid colliding with the Earth. Except for that, I could have been made of rubber.
He sighed now and reached for one of the lace-trimmed chemises my mother had made before she died and which I could still fit into until a few months ago. But he was again unsuccessful. He held the shirt up to my robust chest. Next to me, the shirt looked comical, like a doll’s. It came to a halt a full inch above my hips. My father rummaged in one of Serena Jane’s bureau drawers and pulled out a smocked dress—brand spanking new, a gift from the reverend’s wife. Still no luck. Finally, in desperation because he was late for his shift at the barbershop and because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do, he put me in one of his own shirts, the sleeves rolled over and over on themselves, peeled back like banana skins, the hem scraggling at my feet.
Fatherhood had become a series of negotiations he suspected he was losing. Without my mother, my father simply had no precedent for raising two daughters, especially when they differed as much as Serena Jane and I did. The things that made Serena Jane happy—tea sets, and baby doll clothes, and the leftover bottles of my mother’s nail varnish—made me howl in misery. My father learned quickly enough to give me plainer toys: empty cans to rattle and tower into pyramids; lengths of scratchy rope to coil and knot; a cardboard box with a hole cut in it for a window.
And then there was my appetite. My father couldn’t keep up. He cracked open tin after tin of formula, heating it carefully on the stove the way he’d seen my mother do, then pouring it into a series of sterilized bottles I gulped down as if they were milk-filled thimbles. I cut teeth at three months, and soon after that, my father gave up on the bottles, spooning piles of tapioca pudding into me instead.
“You can’t feed a child that young solid food yet!” Amanda Pickerton scolded during one of her early mercy visits, and my father, his eyes glazed with exhaustion, hunched his shoulders and agreed with her.
“I can’t do any of it,” he admitted, and that’s how Amanda Pickerton came to be briefly in charge of my existence.
Every weekday morning, before he went to cut hair in the barbershop, my father delivered my sister and me to the better judgment of Amanda. The arrangement suited my father (he didn’t care who took us off his hands as long as he actually got to use them), and it suited Amanda, whose children were grown and gone. She was one of those women who needed to hold dominion over something smaller than her, and that was always the whole problem between us. I was never minute enough to squeeze through the cracks of her world.
The morning my father left me on her porch wearing his old shirt, Amanda knit her brows and pulled the corners of her mouth down like sickles. My father shoved us into the house without speaking, his jaw clamped tight, his eyes already focused on the reassuring world of male hair. Serena Jane, highly verbal, did his talking for him.
“Look, Mrs. Pickerton! Truly’s busting at the seams!” she crowed, delighting in my clownish attire.
Amanda stared at Serena Jane and discovered nothing wrong with her, at least. As always, Serena Jane’s hair held its braids perfectly, the ribbons at the ends of them a little crooked, maybe, her skirt not really pleated as stiffly as it could be, but that wasn’t our poor father’s fault. He was just a man, after all, doing his blessed best. It was me who was giving him a run for his money.
That morning, to add insult to the injury of the floppy shirt, I had crumbs clinging to my ample chin and, Amanda noted, a smear of butter glistening on one of my wobbly cheeks. My father put me down next to the placid Serena Jane, and Amanda noticed for the first time that I was getting to be bigger than my sister. Serena Jane’s legs and arms were tender stalks, feminine in their every curve, but my limbs hung awkwardly from my torso as if I were wearing padding. Even my lips looked as though they were squeezed onto my face. Amanda sighed deeply and held an unenthusiastic hand out to me.
“Come on with me, darling,” she cooed. “Let’s see if we can get you fixed up.” She made cow eyes at my father, who was shuffling his feet on the other side of the screen door, eager to get going. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she simpered, smiling at Serena Jane and gripping my fist a little harder than she needed to. “I’ve got some old clothes of Gina’s upstairs that should do the trick. Why, you won’t even recognize her when you get back!” My father flashed a grin, relief making his jaw relax, and turned and lurched down the Pickertons’ steps, blind to how white Amanda’s knuckles were around my hand.
As soon as he turned the corner from the house, Amanda’s smile disappeared. The transformation was remarkable, like a house reverting back to plainness once its holiday baubles were stripped. Without her church face, Amanda Pickerton looked almost like a fox. “Now, dear,” she said to Serena Jane, tidying one of her pigtails’ wilted ribbons, “why don’t you go and play in the sunroom? I’ve set the dolls out for you, and there are some books as well.”
Serena Jane cast an uncertain glance in my direction. “But my sister—”
Amanda cut her off. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about Truly. I’ll take care of her.”
Serena Jane walked over to me and planted a dry kiss on my cheek. I made a grab for her waist, but she held me off. She didn’t like my sticky fingers on her clothes. “Truly likes dolls, too,” she noted to Mrs. Pickerton, and then wandered to the back of the house, where an absorbing array of molded plastic figurines with realistic eyelashes awaited.
Upstairs, in her grown daughter Gina’s old room, Amanda roughly divested me of the offending shirt, then sat me nearly naked in a hard chair with wicker caning. The straw dug into the tender backs of my legs, and I tried to wriggle free, but Amanda caught me and pushed all her weight on my shoulders. “You stay there!” she commanded, her red, red nails digging into my skin. “You sit until you’re told.” Even though I couldn’t form words yet, I was perfectly cognizant of the message. I stopped wriggling and stared at Amanda. On my shoulders, half-mooned welts bloomed.
I watched Amanda sift through several boxes stowed at the back of the closet. Whenever she pulled out another item of clothing, the scent of mothballs billowed through the air. I sneezed, and Amanda looked once sharply over her shoulder but then went back to her task of rooting through the closet. The mothballs didn’t seem to bother her. Sentinel, Amanda’s orange kitten, appeared out of nowhere and began batting at my calves with his claws. I tried to shoo him away, but he refused to go. Amanda turned around and smiled, then gave him a shove with her foot, and he disappeared under the bed. “Good kitty,” she purred at the animal.
She dug up a number of child’s dresses, some of them flowered, some of them smocked with Peter Pan collars, a few pinafores and white lace blouses to go underneath them, and a pair of black patent-leather shoes with straps that circled the ankle. To the top of the pile she added a pair of frilly pantaloons and some ruffled socks. I watched, breathing through my mouth, making unpleasant sucking noises in the stale air of the room. Amanda marched over to me and hooked two fingers under my chin.
“Stop that,” she said, her eyes shining like mean jewels. She lifted me to standing with considerable effort. “You sound like a hog yard. Now, put this on.” Her hands parted the frothy layers of a pink striped dress with embroidered ducks cavorting on its bib. She ballooned open the fabric and tried to shove it over my head. The neck was plenty wide enough—if anything, the dress might even have been too big—but no matter what Amanda Pickerton tried, there was no way to pull the garment over me.
“Sit still!” she barked, but I wriggled and lurched like a fish on a line. In one swift movement, Amanda lifted me onto her lap, taking my place on the chair and clamping her knees tightly around my waist, squeezing until my eyes goggled with surprise and my lips fell slack. Amanda dug one elbow into the back of my ribs, pinning me in place, and wrestled again with the dress.
“If I didn’t know any better,” she spat between clamped teeth, heaving the pink stripes backward over my hair, “I’d say, child, you have got the makings of Satan in you.” As if in protest, I flapped my baby arms, but Amanda laid her own forearm down over my torso and pushed up into my windpipe with one of her knees, gagging me. She spun the dress around and sat me up, forcing my arms into the puffed sleeves, then finally deposited me on the floor.
“There!” Amanda chirped, trying to put her mussed hair back in place with one hand and do the buttons on the dress with the other. “You’re still not pretty, but at least you’re decent.” I ogled her for a moment, and then, with what Amanda would always recall as uncanny adult resolve, I tore the candy-stripe dress from hemline all the way up to collar. Sentinel leapt from under the bed and began batting at the strips.
“Oh!” Amanda gasped, as if someone had punched her in the stomach, and placed a fist in her mouth, biting so hard that she tasted the sour tang of her own blood.
When my father returned at five o’clock, he was met by a glowering Amanda Pickerton. Amanda, he noticed, had a bandage tied around her right thumb, a single spot of blood decorating the gauze like a ruby. I was still wearing the same shirt he’d deposited me in that morning. Before he had even finished crossing halfway over the porch, Amanda lunged toward him and shoved me into his arms as if returning a particularly offensive gift. My father noticed tiny spider lines twitching around the corners of Amanda’s mouth.
“Didn’t she fit in the clothes?” he asked hopefully, casting an eye over the threadbare shirt shrouding me. His heart sank a little. He didn’t earn much from his job cutting hair, and without my mother’s gift with a needle and thread, he didn’t know how he would manage two feminine wardrobes. Amanda growled, her voice as bitter as snake venom.
“Nothing about that child will ever fit
anything
, Earl. You mark my words. She’s little better than a wild beast, and I, for one, am through.”
My father blinked at her, confused. In his arms, my weight was as familiar and reassuring as an old stone. He looked me over but saw no bruises, no scabs or signs of tumbles or spills. Neither was there any evidence of the belt Amanda had taken to my bottom before she’d used it to buckle me to the chair for the rest of the day.
“She didn’t fall out a window again, did she?” he inquired, squinting, and Amanda Pickerton snorted.
“She’ll do worse than that before she’s grown and gone, you mark my words. That girl’s got the devil running right through her bones.” She glanced down at Serena Jane, who was planted next to her on the porch. She ran a hand over Serena’s glossy hair. “This one, however, is a piece of heaven. I’m always happy to look after her.”
She gave Serena Jane a quick kiss on the cheek, then went inside and slammed the front door. In the semidarkness of the hall, surrounded by the respectable scents of furniture polish and a roast in the oven, she paused to examine the gauze on her thumb— a single darkening drop marring the white—before ripping off the bandage and sucking greedily, opening the wound deeper to get a good, long taste of herself.
As my father clumped down State Street back toward home that evening, me asleep over his shoulder and Serena Jane burbling on about tea sets and dolls, he was grateful that it was the weekend. It meant he would have at least two days to sort something out for me, though he couldn’t think what. At home, he heated up a halfhearted can of soup for himself and Serena Jane and warmed a pan of tapioca for me. The shirttails rode up my thighs as he lowered me onto the sofa, but the skin there was rosy and plump—all signs of Amanda’s sharp nails, her pinching fingers, absorbed.
After we were in bed—Serena Jane angelic, her winglike arms spread wide; myself bunched in a ball—my father poured an emergency measure of whiskey and set to thinking. He ran through the women my mother used to know, but sympathetic as they may have been, they all had children and worries of their own—too little time, too little money, too few hands. He sighed and knocked back the rest of the whiskey. That left just one option, even though he wasn’t fond of it. Still, it was better than nothing: oddball August Dyerson. Everyone’s last resort.
The next morning, my father dressed Serena Jane in one of her few remaining dresses and tied a pair of stained pink ribbons into her hair. Serena Jane frowned when she saw the oily marks but said nothing as our father looped the lengths of satin, his clumsy thumbs digging into her scalp. She knew Mrs. Pickerton would do them over right. She always did. My father dumped me into another one of his old shirts, a plaid one this time, and once again rolled up the sleeves over my wrists. I squealed and waved my arms with vigor. I looked like a miniature maestro conducting a crowd.
“That’s good, Truly,” my father told me. “You go on giving ’em hell.”
“Daddy,” Serena Jane asked when he buckled her into the front seat of the Ford and plunked me on her lap, “why are we taking the car?” Usually we walked to the Reverend and Mrs. Pickerton’s.