Simple Compounds

Untitled Part

"Dad..." Squeaked the little voice of the child on striped socks and a nightshirt. 

My dad looked up from his box of CDs, wondering why his 7-year-old daughter was up when she would otherwise be asleep. 

"What's wrong, TJ?" he asked, smiling warmly. He pushed the box aside and sat cross-leg on the cracked linoleum floor. 

"Today at school, these mean girls said that I wasn't pretty and looked like a boy." I told him. Why that was eating at my mind was entirely beneath me, but such were the thoughts of a second grader.

My dad was never any good at sentiments, the way a mother would be, but by god did he know what beauty was. He laughed, putting one hand on his box of CDs again.

"Well, they are right about one thing." He said, preparing to be lynched by my 7-year-old rage. "You do look a little like a boy, but don't think for a second that you aren't beautiful."

I cocked my head in confusion. "Let me show you..." he said, starting to paw through his box of CDs once again.

"I knew there would be a day when you asked about this, I knew it from the second you were born that you would enjoy this..." he muttered to himself, in celebration unaware that I caught every word of it. 

He pulled out an album entitled "The Man Who Sold the World". I eyed the cover curiously. I saw a man (I identified him as a man, based on the title of the album) draped over an antique couch, in a silky dress with long, wavy hair and a beret.

"Do you think he's pretty?" My dad asked. I nodded my head vigorously. My dad chuckled. "He makes a pretty girl, doesn't he?" 

Like clockwork, he pulled out another album. This one had the same man on the cover, just with his hair slicked back and a cigarette dangling from his skinny lips. A picture of masculinity. He showed me another with the man brushing back a weave of golden blonde hair with a gentle look in his baby-blue eyes.

My dad pressed his finger to his lips, thinking of a good way to word his statement while I admired all of the elaborate album covers. 

"Who is he?" I asked, my nomad eyes rimmed with excitement. 

"He goes by a lot of names." He answered, making him seem like a mythical creature in a fairy tale to further astound my 7-year-old mind. "Ziggy Stardust, Thomas Jerome-"

"TJ!" I cut him off before he could finish the sentence.

My dad grinned. "Hell yeah." He verified. His eyebrows dropped as he collected the CDs from the ground and neatly stacked them up. 

"You and him have something in common, TJ." he said, looking into my eyes. "You're beautiful as a boy and a girl. And the best part about that is that you can be whichever one you want, anytime you feel."

"Really?!" I asked, my heart brimming with happiness at my newfound superpower. 

"Nothing is set in stone, so why should you be?" He shrugged. "If you want to be a pretty girl, then do it. If you want to be a boy, then by all means, you do it."

I sat down on the ground next to him and hugged my knees into my chest. My hand reached up into the stumpy ponytail I made with a thin rubber band. I snapped the band and let my thin hair fall.

"You think you can try to get some sleep now, TJ?" he asked.

"I don't think so..." I giggled.

He sighed with a smile. "Well then, why don't you take these up to your room and give them a listen?" He slid the little stack of CDs towards me and I eagerly scooped them up in my arms.

We lived in a poor excuse for a house. It wasn't terrible because it was manic, it was terrible because it was remarkably ordinary. For a low-income family in a city like Dacula, it was the best a single father and his only child could get. The whole floor was cracked linoleum and the walls were so thin, you could punch through them. But it was never anything short of home for my father and I. 

I took the CDs up to my room and laid them out on the floor. I stood on my tip-toes to reach the old CD player my dad put on the top shelf of my bookcase. I popped the first CD off of the top of the stack into the player, but the music was silenced with the sound of the sirens.

I was almost at the point in my life where the sirens didn't faze me anymore, but it still worried my dad.

"Tara-Jerry!" he called out, storming down the hall and almost breaking down the door. His reaction was the only thing that startled me.

"What's wrong, Dad?" I asked him, sitting on my knees on the ground.

"Nothing, TJ..." he said, though his tone of voice convinced me otherwise. "Just..."

He looked down at the old CD player, then back to my suddenly startled face. "Turn the music up all the way, y'know... so we can both hear it."

His real reason was "so maybe you can't hear the sirens". Even as a little kid, I knew he was trying to protect me from what I couldn't understand. 

He held me as close to him as he could while we listened to the seemingly endless collection of David Bowie albums.