The Torn Skirt: A Novel

The Torn Skirt

Rebecca Godfrey

Contents

In the Bushes with the Burnout Boys

Fuck It Up

The Get Laid

Love’s Baby Soft

My Lover, The Dirt

The Ace of Spades

The School for Maps

Another Stupid Stoner Song

Lying at Ledger

Acrobat

The Red Room at White Oaks

A Good Girl

Star Skater Star

The Blue House

P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

Acknowledgments

Praise

Other Books by Rebecca Godfrey

Copyright

About the Publisher

BLAME it on the Pleasure Family. Blame it on the Vietnam War. Blame it on a lot of things. But don’t blame it on Justine. She was just a weak, scared girl; a lost, violent girl. A lot of things, she was. Was.

Or don’t blame it on anything. Call it inevitable, call it the doomed fate of love. Call it karmic, fucked up, the dance of the wolves. Live it, love it, call it life. Call it Led Zeppelin. Yeah, yeah. Really, I don’t really, really don’t fucking care.

I was born with a fever, but it seemed to subside for sixteen years. High school, I was a good girl. I was pretty, I smiled, I fit in fine. And then as I turned sixteen and stopped smiling, the fever returned, though my skin stayed pale and sure, showing no sign of the heat inside me. 102 degrees, it returned for no reason. It returned around the time I met Justine, but blame it on her bad influence and you’d be all wrong.

I come out into the kitchen, have my little chat with the cop. Unsmiling, I get to him. I’m sure of it. All the teen girls on this hick island have flipped-back Farrah Fawcett hair, willing-to-please eyes shadowed in baby blue. Me, in my little shredded dress and desecrated eyes. I don’t shock him, but I’m not what he hoped for. He writes something in his pad.

Teenage Girl. Angst-Ridden. Badly Dyed Hair.

The cop, thirty or so, with a mustache and the dullest eyes, doesn’t ask about Justine. He asks what time I expect my mother back.

Is that relevant to the case?

"Relevant? That’s a big word for a little girl."

Suddenly, I’m nauseous. I’m reeling. I’m realizing all the things I don’t have words for. The world for him a pad of dates, names, serial numbers, license plates. He’d need a soundtrack for his report, a rush of images: her legs alone, her legs kicking backwards, the slit of her skirt ripping as she ran, her legs like wishbones.

Some more notes in his pad now; I imagine them.

Single-Parent Family. Headed by Father. That Crazy Diehard Hippie.

And get this: the cop is checking me out. I thought the sight of me might disgust him, but I should have known. Just because I’m soft-skinned and sixteen, they get this sick, weak look. Speed kicking in, not making me mellow, lazy, hazy, and high. Making me violent and blue, restless and aware of all the things I’ve got to do. All the things I’ve got to do.

Touch my forehead, I tell him.

He does this, with little hesitation.

You’re hot.

Yeah, I seem to be coming down with a bit of a fever.

Maybe you should lie down and we can talk in your room.

This whole thing has been very disturbing for me.

I’m sure it has been, he says. "Disturbing, that’s a good word."

He stands up. Moves toward me.

I have a fever, I tell him. You’d better stay away.

I head for my bedroom, and hear him walking away past the marijuana plants that line my father’s shelves.

He’s left my house and gone to jerk off, I bet. Jerk off in the front seat of his cruiser. I’m in my bedroom and he’s imagining me here. A little girlyworld of Maybelline and heartthrobs Scotch-taped above pink pillows. Really, it’s a bare room of white walls and Justine’s books and skirts scattered all over the floor.

I try to sleep, but sleep’s not easy when you’re on speed. I guess the cop never left because now he’s knocking on my door. I ask him to leave; I tell him I’m too hot to talk. Fuck. He says we must, but I won’t. Just laughing at the thought of him banging down the bedroom door of a teenage girl. He imagines it pink and soft. He has no idea.

IN THE BUSHES WITH THE BURNOUT BOYS

I GUESS all this shit started when I was in the bush. I loved the bush. Behind our school, it was like some tangled, rising creature, hands reaching skyward; a thousand savage, skinny fingers. Evergreens and Scotch pines twisting with blackberry bushes and dead oaks. Mornings before school, I used to head into it with my stupid Swiss Army knife. Hack and chop a path leading into a clearing. And at lunch hour, I’d bring the burnout boys in.

I’m not making this up: the burnout boys all had one-syllable names: Bryce, Bruce, Dean, and Dale. They were only a bit wayward, but they thought they were real rebels. Bragging as they brought out their plastic baggies of mushrooms and weed.

May: the bush was rainsoaked; we were whacked around as we went in. I lifted branches back, holding them so the burnouts could enter. We sat on the ground, in a dry place, hidden from the concrete slab of our school. Here, the mountains faded from view. The blue sky went white.

It began to rain again, the pale, common May rain. I sat down on the dirt, lay back with my hair on a broad, mossy rock. The air smelled great at this moment—it smelled like rot and rain and Christmas.

Bryce drove his red pickup truck to the bush and opened the front door. Twelve o’clock: the Power Hour. Burnouts loved the Power Hour. Heaven. For them. They know every word. They sang along, pretending guitars were in their hands. They sang the Lemon Song to me.

Squeeze me baby so the juice runs down my leg.

My father used to say his generation fucked up in a lot of ways, but at least they invented rock and roll.

You can have it, I’d say. But the burnouts want it. They raised their fists in my clearing, sang the Lemon Song. They looked pretty hilarious.

What’s so funny?

She’s just high, Dean said, though they all knew I never smoked pot. I couldn’t click with that giggly, slow, stupid state of being.

No, I said, I’m not high. I’m—

Laughing at you is what I was about to say.

Dean Black covered my knee with his hand. A light pat.

What’s so funny, Ice Queen?

Everyone at school called me Ice Queen. There was always someone telling me to smile and not look so stuck-up.

I could feel moss catching in my hair. I wanted to go back to class with the dirt under my fingernails; rain streaking my mascara; a crown of twigs and moss. I hoped Dean Black would lift the steely brown brambles from my red hair.

Dean Black’s the headcase; the heartthrob; the one I’m supposed to love. He’s got silky, shoulder-length hair, an Afro comb tucked in his Bootlegger jeans. He wants to be a rock and roll star, but he’ll settle for planting trees. After he receives a diploma from Mount Doug—or Mount Drug, as it’s known—he’ll go up to Horsefly Lake. That’s where the logging companies have cut down all the trees, thrown down napalm, burned and slashed the stumps. In the charred black ground, kids like Dean will plant sprigs. They’ll earn ten cents a tree. He’s seen me with my Swiss Army knife, hacking off branches. He thinks I should come with him. He smiles bratty when he talks about treeplanting; his grin’s crooked and pure. He wants me to come and sleep in his tent, but I can’t imagine him in a cremated forest. I can’t even imagine him carless. I can only see him as he is. The guy who drives to the liquor store and walks in without fear. Bottle in hand, bounding back to the car, raising his arms and bellowing, We are the champions. He’d slide up the window, put his hands up my shirt, and swig Southern Comfort. His hands up my shirt, he’d sigh kindly. He really wasn’t a bad guy. Especially when he was alone. I’d bring him down to Arbutus Cove. We’d lie in the crevice where the curve of rock was still damp from the tide. Grappling like we were in the black water, blind and floating, he’d get nervous. I didn’t want him to move away from me and reach for his prized plastic bag. I’d tease him. Offer to take off my top if he threw his drugs in the water. A hard choice for a burnout. Don’t make me do this, he’d say, and then he’d give in.

I thought I was on to something.

Lying in the crevice with him, I could forget about treeplanting and living on an island where the ocean surrounded me, always.

In the bushes, he’s different. I can’t tell him how much I hate the music on his radio, how familiar lazy days, loud guitars, and slow, stoned laughter are to me. I’ve known all this since I was a kid, but to him it was new and fresh, a real risk. His mother had sewn Led Zeppelin’s logo on the back of his jacket, in gold thread. His father was the manager of Canadian Tire, which made Dean the wealthiest kid in our school. Except for Ivy Mercer, and no one talked to her. She had a haughty stare and hid out in the library. Maybe later I’d make another feeble attempt to befriend Ivy, but for now I was in the bushes with the burnouts.

And then Heather Hale walked by.

As always, she was in tight jeans and had perfectly curled hair. Blond wings framed her face; she had a ski-jump nose and a slight limp. Heather Hole, they called her. I liked her, but she never seemed to have much to say to me. She walked by the bush, avoiding the clearing. I could see her, heading for the subdivision cul-de-sac.

Heather walked like an old man, as though she was slowly going blind, unsure of her step.

Dean whistled, put his hand on my knee in that shut-up kind of way.

Hey hose, he said.

Hey garden hose, Bruce said.

Dale made a motion near his crotch, as if he was whipping a snake around.

Heather kept walking, but I saw her wilt. Wilt and crumple. God, get her some oxygen, I almost said. She was a tough stoner girl. She had a leather purse full of silver-foiled balls of hash and stolen Maybelline. Once, she’d changed her tampon in front of me while sipping her father’s gin. But now I knew she was soft. She should have known better. She had this soft, hurt look as she limped by.

What’s the garden hose? I asked. Heather had gone into her car, but I couldn’t see her face. Her windshield was covered with rain.

They answered me, probably only because a question from me caught them off guard.

So, lucky me, sitting in the enchanted forest, missing math class. Getting to hear all the details of how they’d spent Friday night putting a garden hose up Heather. After they’d gone there. Dean, Dale, Bryce, Bruce. One by one. Then they washed her out, washed her clean. She was really clean, man, she was so wet. And she loved it, they said, she loved the way we cleaned her.

Dean broke a branch with his hands as Bryce spoke. Bryce spoke, I wouldn’t say proudly. He spoke of the garden hose incident like it was a distant fun break, a video game. I kept looking at Dean, and I really didn’t know what to do because I didn’t know if this was normal, if burnout idiots did that shit all the time because they read in Hammer of the Gods that Robert Plant did the same thing to a groupie. I got up. I didn’t feel the fever, but I felt a warmth, like a thousand fists slamming up against taut skin. A hidden current you find, but what good is it? What do you do with it? I had no idea.

So that was the end of my little love affair with Dean Black. I went back inside the school and spent the rest of math class in a toilet stall, staring at my veins and reading the bad poetry on the wall. If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it was always yours. Someone had scrawled over the last words, so it now read, If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, SHOOT IT.

Heather Hale came into the girls’ room. I recognized her white pumps; she always wore them with white ankle socks. Through the gap under the door of the stall, I watched her hands frantically rubbing dirt off her white pumps. I could hear water running, and her voice saying ShitShitShit as she went down once more with the paper towel, scrubbing her muddy heels. I thought if I went out, she might cry, and I would have to comfort her. Not having a mother around, you’re frightened when you have to hug and console and do all those motherly things. I didn’t want to have to comfort her.

But she wasn’t crying. She was staring in the mirror, putting on lip gloss.

I’m so sorry about that, I said.

She looked startled. She backed away from me. She fumbled with something in her purse.

Sorry about what? she said. Her voice was soft, breathless.

That garden hose thing.

She kept looking in the mirror. She covered her freckles with foundation.

It was just sex, she said. They wanted to do it so I let them. She shrugged her shoulders.

I didn’t smile, though she smiled at me. She shrugged her shoulders again. Erase this, she seemed to be saying, erase, erase, erase. I thought, Fine, disappear before my eyes.

Did I handle that right? I really didn’t know what to do. When I got home from school, I went straight for the wild garden behind our house and looked for Seamus, but he wasn’t around. There was a large apple tree at the back of our garden, and he’d put my rusted tricycle up in the boughs as some kind of monument to my former days as a toddler adventuress.

I wished Everly was around. I hadn’t thought about her for a long time, really. Hey, Mom, should a girl care if a guy sticks a garden hose up her and laughs about it the next day? I doubted she’d know. Maybe she got into that kind of thing too. After all, she’d left me and Seamus for the leader of the Pleasure Family.

When he walked in that night, I stayed in my bedroom, looking at some pictures of models I had torn from magazines. Some glossy good girls. I could hear him, busy, in the kitchen. He might be rolling a joint, sealing the edges of white paper with the roselike tip of his tongue.

You OK, honey? he yelled to me. Got to give him credit. He never told me to smile; he never came into my room.

I went out and sat silent at the kitchen table. He looked like a little bald Buddha in blue overalls. Rhubarb was boiling over, staining the white stovetop I’d just scrubbed. He started talking about the Trees. I didn’t really listen. I’d heard this speech before. The Trees of Eden. The Trees of Paradise. Soon as it was summer he would go up to Tofino. He said, in the forests, he’d build a house with his own hands. He thought I should come with him and learn the crucial skills of carpentry. I couldn’t tell him I had no interest in carpentry.

I would never tell him that.

He was all I had, and he’d done so much for me. He had a good heart. Who could fault him? I guess we were close, but not close enough for me to say, What do you do when you go to a school where girls get a garden hose stuck up in them and smile like they need no comfort?

Seamus and I ate rhubarb soup in front of the TV. Our TV. We had this neighbor who was always giving us stuff. Toasters and hair dryers, a TRS-80, and now the TV. I guess he thought we should get into the electronic age.

Ronald Reagan was on TV smiling in a cowboy hat. He looked like one happy cowboy.

I’ll get you, Seamus was saying. He went over to the screen. I’ll get you, he said, and he tapped the screen.

Dad.

He was pretty high. I don’t think he noticed.

Ronald Reagan kept on smiling.

That garden hose thing was really getting to