The Gift
(Disclaimer: This is MY STORY. I know my mom's version of it is different, and I respect that. While I'm at it, my sister's version is probably different too, and my brother's, but this version, well, it's mine! Oh, and I didn't write this to hurt you, Mom. I just wanted you to know that upfront. I'd love it, Mom, if you would tell me your story -- write it down, even, for us to read!)
I sit cross-legged on the cold, linoleum floor watching the drill team warm up for tonight’s big football game. My sweaty hands drip into my lap, and the salty water rolls around on my polyester blend cheerleading skirt. Our team will lose, but no one seems to care. Our guys are hot, handsome rednecks with Skoal rings on the back pockets of their Wrangler jeans, but they can't cut it on the football field. Each Friday, they promise us this will be the night for victory. So we pack ourselves into the gym for the morning pep rally. We cheer and yell and stomp our school spirit into bellows that echo through the rafters, and then we finish the school day in the buzz of adrenaline manufactured by jumping and screaming cheerleaders, shaking and twirling drill team dancers, and the loud, guttural chants of the senior class who hope against hope that this just may be the year we break our historic losing streak. But I know better. This will be loss number 41.
It's two hours before the game, and both the cheerleaders and the drill team are gathered in their respective corners of the school lobby preparing for our appearances on the field. I watch the drill team girls as they pull on white leg warmers, zip and hook each other's sequence body suits, and apply bright blush and red lipstick to their pale white faces while my twin sister French braids my hair.
It smells like feet. Like Aviance Musk and Charlie perfume. It is musty and sweet and nauseating. The humidity is suffocating. The sweat on my hands and in my lap makes me antsy. I pat and pat and pat them on my skirt. I put each hand up to my freckled, round face and blow on them without moving the rest of my body. I wave them back and forth and back and forth and the sweat rolls down my arms and rests at each elbow. I reach over to grab my towel from my blue and white duffle bag. I have been toting around a towel for my sweaty hands since I was five years old. When I stretch out, Lelia yanks my hair and pulls me back.
"Crap. Shelia. If you make me mess up and have to start over, I won't do it!
Sit still!" Her voice screeching at me, and I know she resents braiding my hair because I cannot return the favor. My wet hands stick to each strand and make a big tangled mess when I try to braid hers.
"I need to dry off my hands," I whimper.
Squeezing her grip, she grits her teeth and says, "Not now. I'm almost done. You want it to be tight, don’t you?" I carefully move my hands up from my skirt and pat them on my baby blue, royal blue, and white, striped sweater. I feel the pull of her fingers on my tender scalp, and I squeeze my big, blue eyes shut to alleviate the sting of her hold on me.
Four equidistant cement beams hold up the foyer ceiling. Pom poms lay around one, muddled together with letter jackets, book bags, and megaphones. I count the pleats in my skirt without taking a breath. Lelia yanks my hair again but doesn't say she's sorry. I know better than to squirm or flinch. She is all business. She doesn't do pity or pain. My skirt cuts into my waist, and I shift my hips to loosen it.
I contemplate the beauty of the other cheerleaders, especially Lelia's. She has long, chocolate brown hair that drapes down her back like the pictures I've seen of Niagara Falls. Her features are small and delicate, and her eyes are dark like the Arabian nights you hear about in stories. My brother Craig calls her Boney because she is so skinny, and skinny is what I've never been. He calls me Fatso.
“Hey Fatso, get me a glass of tea, and I won’t call you fatso anymore,” Craig demands of me. He sits in the recliner in the living room, his feet up, fingering the cracked vinyl on the arm of the chair while watching Batman and Robin or Get Smart. It used to be Dad’s chair, but now it belongs to my brothers. Sammy is the oldest and the sweet one, but he is never home. He roams around trying to find something to fill up the hole in the pit of his soul. Sammy was 13 when dad died, and he is the only one of us kids who went to the hospital with mom to see dad's body before they took it away.
He never got over that, the image of dad's mangled face and twisted body after being catapulted through the windshield of his pick up truck and landing 100 yards away in a ditch. Sammy bore dad's death in a way that the rest of us did not. He sought solace in girlfriends and roller hockey, but he did not seek it at home. The chair belongs to Craig.
Mom is asleep in her bedroom with the door shut. She never hears or sees Craig treat me this way. When she is awake, she bangs the headboard of her bed against the wall when she wants something: a cheese sandwich, iced tea with one squirt of lemon juice, not two, in a glass-glass, not a plastic one, or the mail from the mailbox. Craig learns from her how to get what he wants.
He reclines in the chair and taunts me, “Hey, Fatso, get me a glass of tea, and I won’t call you fatso anymore.” I get him the tea every time he asks, and he takes it from my hands and says, “Thanks, Fatso.”
Lelia is the pretty one. No one says it in those words, but it's been clear to me since Grandma S. started telling the story of the day we came home from the hospital. The first time I remember hearing it, I am 7 years old. Grandma thinks it's a great story, but each time she tells it, I know I don’t belong.
In a thick, Southern accent and the drawing out of each syllable, grandma tells it like this, "You girls couldn't of looked more different. Shelia, you had a head so bald everyone thought you were a little boy. Lelia, you had a head full of dark hair, and you were the spittin' image of my own baby pictures. Honey, you still look just like your old grandma. On the day Craig saw you for the first time, he announced in his five year old voice, 'I want this one,' pointing at Lelia. 'Sammy, you get that one!'" Everyone laughs at her rendering and says to Craig, "Oh, how cute you were!"
Today is our 16th birthday, and we have a football game to cheer at tonight. I am anxious as usual because I am not the cheerleader type. I never get the movements sharp enough or the jumps up high. Lelia is the cheerleader. I am a cheerleader because she is one, and I want to be like her, but I belong on the pitcher's mound on the softball field.
I am relieved to finally be sixteen. We both passed our driver's test earlier this morning. We have been driving without a license for a year, and it's been bothering me. I am a black and white kind of girl. It's either right or wrong, and driving without a license is wrong. Now Lelia and I can drive to work at Fayva Shoe store, and I won't have to pray out loud to Jesus the entire way that we don't get pulled over.
I have no expectation of a party or a cake or even a gift. But today, mama enters the lobby of N. C. High School carrying two small boxes, one for each of us. They are those white boxes jewelry comes in when you buy something at a department store. They are unwrapped with just a simple blue ribbon tied around each.
I look at my mama from where I am seated on the floor, and her eyes light up. She smiles in a way I have never seen. I want to trust this moment, to go with it, but I see the dark cloud that hangs over her. I do a double take, and I catch a glimpse of the style that everyone else sees in her K-Mart pants suit and frosted hair. She has this amazing way of pulling it all together.
But I know better. I know how she lives--how we live because of her. As she walks in our direction, I see the filth of the sheets she sleeps in each night because her king-sized bed is littered with old newspapers, tangled coat hangers, cereal bowls with spoons stuck in place by soured milk, and mountains of dirty clothes that prevent her from changing them. With each step she takes across the lobby floor, I picture the narrow path she's created from her side of the bed to the master bathroom. The worn down shag carpet is no longer beige but almost black.
Dad's death killed her, and she's been killing off the rest of us ever since, but I'm still alive enough to see it all. I feel both disgust and anticipation.
Lelia is tying my braids together with a thick, white bow when mama gets to us.
"Happy Birthday, Girls!" She giggles as she says it, and the rolls of fat around her middle shake a little. She has this glint of pride in her eyes. She gets it in those moments when she is counting on us to be her trophies. She hands one box to me and the other one to Lelia. We look at each other and hurry to open them. We know that whatever it is, it is the same for both of us. Possibly different colors. We each want to find out first. Too often on Christmas, one of us opens a gift more quickly than the other and spoils the surprise.
Lelia gets it open first and is about to blurt out what it is when I scream, "No, don't tell me!" and run across the lobby to hide behind the next cement beam so I can focus on my gift. I lift off the small, white lid, and peek inside the box. It is a diamond necklace. I have seen it before. Not in this form, but I remember immediately its beauty and the story behind it.
On Christmas day of 1969, six months before he died, my daddy gave my mama a pair of diamond earrings. The earrings were unique in that each one was made up of two diamonds. The one on top pierced the ear and the other dangled down from the lobe. Mama wore them on special occasions when we were little, and each time, she'd tell us, "These earrings are the last gift your daddy gave me before he died." And I would gasp in the awe of their beauty and in the fantasy of this man who is my dad. It is one of the only stories my mama ever tells us about him. All of my life I've asked her "What was Dad like?" questions, and without fail, she replies, "I don't remember." So this story, all by itself, is one of my most precious treasures.
The diamond earrings have been transformed into two separate necklaces, each with a simple gold chain threaded through a small gold loop that has been added to the top diamond and the other dangles below it. I take it out of the box, caress it in my sweaty hands, close my eyes, and try to remember my dad. But I cannot remember. Glancing back at Mom and Lelia, I clasp it around my neck.
