Fem

Part 6

I heard the tail end of a joke at recess. Snow White sat on Pinocchio's face and said, Lie to me Pinocchio, lie to me!

*

Jeremy likes to look at my dad's Playboys. He's obsessed with boobs. Sometimes I catch him looking at my mom's, or my sister's. He has all these names for boobs. He'll say, these are uppers, those or downers, these are mountains, those are molehills, these are jugs, those are tumblers. He has all these names for nipples too, like cherries or nubs.

*

My mom has piles and piles of textbooks on the desk on her bedroom. I used to make her laugh by reading her textbooks out loud in my Ronald Reagan voice. I don't do that anymore. I'm older now, plus my mom would just get irritated. She'd say she needs to focus or she might flunk out. Flunk is an old word that no one uses any more.

She says as a woman she has to work twice as hard as a man for half as much credit. She thinks she might be too old for law school. If she talks too much about it, it makes her cry.

She hates lawyers but she wants to become one anyway. She wants to be the kind of lawyer that helps poor people. One of her textbooks is about how Indians want their land back. There's highlighting all over it.

At school everyone calls Indians wagonburners. I said wagonburner once at home. My mom blew her top. She said if she ever heard me use that word again, I'd be sleeping in the yard. I said, Like in a teepee?

I thought I was being funny, but she went all quiet, which was worse than the yelling. After that, I didn't joke about Indian stuff anymore. If my mom heard all the jokes that I hear at school, she might lay down and die. Everyone talks all the time about lazy Indians drinking Lysol and collecting welfare. I need to protect her from all that. If she knew the truth about how people really talked, she might lock me in the house.

*

Teachers love rocks. They're always telling you what's igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic. They can't get enough of it. And also about how cows have four stomachs.

*

Jeremy calls his living room a front room. We call the basement room with the TV a rumpus room, but everyone else would say rec room or family room. Chad calls his underwear gitch, gonch, gonchies, or gitchies. Wayne calls long underwear long johns. When you don't grow up saying it, you can never make it sound right. I could never in a million years say I was putting on my gitch in the front room.

*

Mr. Stalker read us a poem about a geography teacher who dreamed about travelling the world but died before he got the chance. I think Mr. Stalker was trying to make us feel sorry for him. I don't though. He spends most of the day reading newspapers at his desk.

*

I was listening in to my mom talking to her sister on the phone.

Honestly, she said, when boys turn thirteen I think we should release them into the forest, let them fend for themselves for a few years, and invite them home when they're ready to get a learner's permit.

*

It was one of those nights when everything was wrong. My mom made salmon pie and some squashy vegetable that was boiled to string and mush. My dad came home from work with a splitting headache. Katherine came to the table with her Walkman on.

My mom gave us our plates. My dad rubbed his temples. Katherine rolled her eyes.

My mom said, Dig in.