Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman Page A

because Uncle gets meaner the longer the days goes on. He says I’m so stupid the only scout troop I could ever belong to is one that troops off a cliff, says I’m feebleminded like all the women in our family, like all the women in the world!”
    I’d tried to imagine anyone calling Viv stupid. “I got an uncle like that,” I’d said, and she’d nodded.
    She said she knew that I did, and when I asked her how, because I never talked about the Hardware Man, she’d said, “I could just tell, that’s probably why we’re in the same troop!”
    Ms. Hyatt has just taught us about exclamation marks and how they do the same work as a period but in a bigger way, to show emotion. Every time Viv talks, I feel an exclamation mark, POP!, in my head, like her sentences all end this way. It’s a way that makes me feel like we’re really true friends, best friends, like Stephanie and Jena-with-one-n who get to sit together, and how if we were in the same class we’d sit together and write BEST FRIENDS 4-EVER with a hundred exclamation points like the ones Viv uses to answer my question now.
    “My house is like yours but sunk in the ground so it can’t go
anyplace. Not like your …” she pauses before she says it, she’s still getting used to not calling it a trailer, “house!” She swings her arms and legs fast, pushing like me but harder. “Your house could go places!”
    “Nope,” I say, finishing my wings and getting up, careful not to mess my angel’s skirt. I help Viv up, and we brush twigs off each other and check our work, two angels flattening the sage. “It just looks that way.”

stucco
    S ingle-wide, double-wide, a house with a hitch. Single mom, gravel drive. Propane by the gallon, generic cigs by the carton, and solitaire round the clock. Cousins and animals multiply like cars in the front yard. Nothing around here gets fixed.
    The Calle is not a through street. The road is paved with uncles. Smokey, Barney, Johnny Law, Pig, uncles with their badges, with their belt buckles, say, “Hey Sugar, Toots, Sweet Thing, is your mama home?” hand already through the already ripped screen door, finger on the latch.
    “When you play solitaire you’re playing against the Devil,” the Calle Grandmas say through false teeth, yella teeth, broken teeth, through pink gums hidden behind hands paused from stringing garlands of silver beer tabs. Hands that threaten to shuffle the spots off the cards, threaten to “smack you so hard your no-good daddy’ll fall outta bed” if you don’t stop interrupting the idiot box with your idiot mouth and see to that mess in the kitchen.
    Fifty-two pick-up. Suicide kings and one-eyed jacks face off on orange shag. Calle girls cry uncle through clenched teeth and past his shoulder the sirens flash redneck blues across the white-stucco, nicotine-yellow ceiling.

boom
    H ere’s how the Hardware Man makes the lights go out. I say I have to potty and he says that he will help me, and takes my hand, and we go to the back of the store through aisles of fan blades and boxes of electrical tape to the bathroom that is supposed to be for girls and boys, but I think really only for boys, because there are boot prints all over the tile and the soap is dirty. I can’t reach to turn on the light. The light is at the top of the ceiling and turns on with a chain that you pull once for on and twice for off, but it’s high above the sink and I can’t reach it even if I stand on the seat.
    The Hardware Man can reach it, though, and he pulls the chain once and closes the door. And he locks the door and undoes my pants, he says because I am little and I need help going to the bathroom. He always says that, just like he always says that good little girls like me should wear dresses. But I always wear pants. Mama doesn’t like dresses and he knows that but he also knows that I can go to the bathroom by myself so I don’t tell him anything. And then I forget all about having to pee because he is