The End of the World (Girlhoods assignment)

Carrie-Lynne Davis, age 9½

Dear Nana Dee,

When I told my Mom that I was gonna write you a letter, she said that the Dead can’t read letters and I should pray instead. I’ve never been too good at praying. I tried a lot in bible camp last summer but instead of closing my eyes like I should’ve, I peeked around the room and watched all the kids on their knees mouthing silent words to the ceiling. I never knew what to say to God, since he was supposed to know everything. My friend Mary Beth even told me that he can hear our thoughts. This made me nervous, ‘cause I’ve thought a lot of mean things in my life, and as far as I knew, as long as you didn’t say it out loud, then you weren’t being bad. I guess I was wrong. I bet God thinks I’m a brat.

If you’re up in heaven, can you tell God that I’m a nice girl? I do my homework and try to be nice to Tonya, even when she does stupid things. The other day we were standing in the line for the Bus. I turned to Mary Beth and told her that one day I was going to marry a doctor and he’d make so much money that we’d live in a mansion, with a swimming pool and everything. Then Stupid Tonya butted in. She said, how am I gonna marry a doctor when I’m so fat? What nerve. I whirled around and looked her square in her eyes and told her to mind her beeswax and what’s she talking about me being fat for when she’s way fatter than me. That shut her up.

Now that I think of it,  I must’ve hurt her feelings. We can be right snotty to each other sometimes. Lately I’ve been keeping a notebook of mean things I want to say but can’t. I got the idea from this book called Harriet the Spy. Have you read it, Nana Dee? It’s about a girl named Harriet who wants to be a writer and a spy when she grows up. I don’t want to be a spy, but I’d love to be a writer & have the whole world hear what I have to say. I’d write sad poems like Sylvia Plath—she’s my Mom’s favorite. I don’t much understand her poems, but they sound nice when you read ‘em out loud. Mom says that poetry keeps the blood flowing. I want to make someone’s blood flow, especially Mom’s, since she’s so sad all the time now.

Since you left, things have been pretty different around here. Dad moved to the Caribbean to marry a “bimbo” named Katia, who used to be his secretary but now folds his laundry. She’s darker than Mom and prettier, but I’d never say that out loud. She doesn’t speak English very well—she says my name like “Caddie-Leen”—but I don’t think that’s too bad for Dad. He’s never liked talking. Mom talks all the time, so maybe that’s why they got a Divorce. A little bit after that, Grampa died. When we visited him in the hospital, his hair was gone and he wore a paper dress that kept falling off him. There were big sores all up his legs, like round red ponds, leaking red rivers down to his crusty toes. I kept asking Mom what was wrong with Grampa, but she told me to be quiet and kept talking to him like she always did. Before we left the last time, he peed himself like a baby. I turned away and the inside of my stomach became heavy and sour. It felt like I wasn’t supposed to see it. I never want to be old like that.

            My Gramma and Grampa had fourteen kids. Isn’t that a lot? I can’t imagine having so many babies. Mom was the twelfth one.  They were very poor. Once, I asked Mom if we were poor or rich and she said we were in the middle. Though that was before Dad left.

After he married Katia, we had to move to our apartment on Pine Street, which is where poor people live, according to my aunt Cindy. Poor people are a lot louder, it seems, and more angry. Darlene from next-door is always yelling at her boyfriend out in the driveway for being so lazy. She says he’s good for nothing. That’s not true though, ‘cause once when Tonya and I were playing Rummy on the pavement down there, he shouted to us to come over and see something. He was sitting on his stoop and drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. We came over and he smiled—he had golden teeth! That’s when he started juggling some oranges he had from a shopping bag. First he juggled three, and then four, and even made it to five before he messed up and they all fell, rolling away into the grass. When Tonya and I picked ‘em up and tried giving them back, he winked and said that growing girls need growing fruit, which didn’t make any sense to us. We said thank-you anyway and went back to Rummy with our new ‘growing fruit.’

            After I won a bunch of games, Tonya asked me if fruit really made girls grow bigger. I told her she was dumb. If fruit really did make girls bigger, I’d toss out all the fruit in our apartment, since Tonya and I were sure big enough. Mom always says that we just have Baby Fat, but we’re not babies anymore and I have the biggest boobs out of anyone in my grade. I bet I even have bigger boobs than the girls in the fifth grade, they’re that big. Mary Beth and our friend Amanda recently got training bras, but I think that’s no big deal ‘cause I’ve been

wearing a bra since the third grade. Amanda said it’s because I’m fat. Even though it hurt my feelings, I didn’t say anything, since it’s true.

            I hope Tonya’s wrong about doctors hating fat girls. I guess what I really hope is that I won’t be fat forever. I see myself one day as a pretty woman with long brown hair, boobs that don’t bounce all crazy when I run, and eyes that make boys stare for a long, long time. I remember in church, Miss Patty said that in God’s eyes, everyone is beautiful.  One day I’ll be beautiful. I know it.

             

______________________________________________

Carrie-Lynne Davis, age 13  

            Dear Nana Dee,

           

            Middle school is Hell. Was it this crappy back in the day? I guess it probably was. The girls are all snobby and scheming, prancing around the hallways in she-wolf packs with their new boobs and tight jeans so low you can see their butt cracks! The boys are crude and uninterested, especially when it comes to girls like me. A fat girl, that is. I thought maybe I’d outgrow my jelly rolls, or rather, I’d hoped I would, but just my luck, I’ve grown fatter than ever. I’ve got a face like a pimpled Cabbage Patch Kid and a butt the size of the sun. In gym class I sulk off to the sides because I’m embarrassed of these gigantic boulders sagging down from my chest. I have to wear two bras, Nana Dee. Two bras don’t even hold these bad boys down.

And so, this quarter I got my first C. Ever. In gym, of course. My teacher is this hassled red-faced man with a buzz-cut and a personal vendetta against me. Davis! He’ll shout at me. Let’s go! Get up! Move those legs! For the past few years, the only time I like moving my legs is if it’s on my way to the fridge. I don’t mean to poke fun at myself, really, I do think there might be something wrong with me. I daydream about eating a lot. I mean, a lot. I’ll have just eaten lunch and before I’m done with the last bite, I’m already thinking about when my next meal’s going to be. When I wake up, the first thing I do before all else is eat something. It’s the last thing I do before I go to bed, too. What’s my problem? The worst part is that I don’t even feel better after I eat a crapload of food, I just feel worse about myself. I don’t understand me. 

Mary Beth has a boyfriend now and she put highlights in her hair and spends her Friday nights getting ready for high school parties instead of going to the movies with Amanda and me. Last week at lunch we confronted her, telling her that we felt she didn’t want to be our friend anymore. She said we were being dramatic and we should just be chill. She’s started using words like chill and legit. She thinks she’s one of “those girls” now. It makes me want to blow chunks. The worst part is that she’s on the honor roll this quarter and I’m not because of that lousy C in gym. Perfect & pretty Mary Beth doesn’t have a problem in gym, no ma’am. All she needs to do is stretch her arms out or bend over and all the guys fall over, drooling like a bunch of trolls. I hate it.

Aside from the C, I have all A’s. My English teacher—who we all call ‘Doc’—held me after class the other day and asked me if I’d considered college. I haven’t, really. Neither of my parents went to college & especially now that we’re poor as Hell, it’s just never been something I’ve considered seriously. I felt special that he’d take the time to stay after school and talk to me about it for a good half-hour. After I went home, I went on the Internet and looked at a bunch of colleges.

I fell in love, Nana Dee! Did you know anyone who went to college? It looks amazing—you can study to be anything you want! I know they used to say that to us all the time in elementary school, but it never really meant anything until now.

College.

What a dream.

I want this. I want to sit on the grassy campus quad, sipping a coffee with my girlfriends, talking passionately about important things like the election or whatever’s happening in the Middle East. I want to take classes about things that actually interest me. I want to live in a dormitory with a bunch of other like-minded people. College sounds like summer camp. Only, when you leave, no one’s singing Kumbaya over an acoustic guitar, instead you get a degree, years of knowledge, and a Get-Out-of-Poverty-Free card. Doc said that I need to keep my grades up and keep writing. I’ve been sending him my stories and poems through email. He wants me to join his Creative Writing class. He says I might be able to “go somewhere” with my stories.

I sure hope so. I’d be lucky if my writing got me anywhere other than here.

_______________________________________

Carrie-Lynne Davis, age 17

            Dear Nana Dee,

           

            After you died, I remember that for a while, whenever we were bad, my mother would tell us about how cruel your children were to you—how they made you lose your hair, how they wore on your failing nerves, how much earlier they pushed you into the dark. I think I understand now. Families do this. They make us and break us, pour water on us when we won’t get out of bed, print us out directions to that art school in Boston, yell back

at us even louder, make us heal, make us hurt. Sometimes I think my mother and sister have gone crazy. Most times I think it’s just me.

            Though High School is certainly less confusing than the dreaded middle grades, I’m finding that it’s no less difficult. Boys still don’t talk to me and I suspect now that they never will. I’ve given up on the foolish notion that I’ll miraculously lose weight and come back to school with higher self-esteem and a smokin’ bod. Most of my friends have had sex already. I haven’t even kissed a boy, let alone gone all the way. My old friend Mary Beth is pregnant and works at Arby’s. Sometimes after school I’ll go to the drive-through on my way home. She asks me if she can help me. In my head, I imagine helping her instead. I tell her I need a moment to look on the menu and I sit there thinking. Over hop-skotch, Mary Beth once told me that she wanted to be an astronaut and live on Venus. I wonder if she knew that Venus was a terrible place to live, full of storms and unbearable heat. It’s a cruel planet, I’d tell her, and the days seem endless.

I don’t need to tell her that anymore. She knows.

            Through the speaker box, I order everything off the dollar menu, pretend to not recognize Mary Beth as she hands me a giant greasy bag, and drive away, into a parking lot. There I sit and eat and eat and eat until I cannot anymore and then I throw it all up by the dumpsters behind the nearby K-Mart, which closed down years ago.

They say these years are the best of your life.

            I’ve applied to a slew of colleges, Nana Dee. I think you’d be proud of me. When I told my father that I wanted to study writing, he laughed his static laugh, like through a tin can, and said that he’d thought I learned how to write years ago. I didn’t chuckle. Although I haven’t even received any letters back, my mother calls me College Girl now, in a sort of snide way, while she sits there at the kitchen window behind a newspaper, puffing on her hundred cigarettes. Tonya’s started smoking, too. She’s just entered high school and listens to the rock radio station now. Weary of being the perpetual dodge ball target for heartless bullies in the 7^th and 8^th grades, she charged into the 9^th grade with dyed black hair, a spiked choker, and a radically new outlook on her circumstances. Instead of being hassled by the insufferable Abercrombie girls, people make way for her when she walks down the hallway, gape in silence at the stitches on her lips drawn in permanent marker, and may sometimes whisper about her, but I have the sneaking suspicion that Tonya Chanel Davis will no longer have to endure the pain of an echoing, “HEY FAT-ASS!” from a faceless person across the cafeteria.  At lunch, I sit with her because it’s the thing to do. When I was her age, I ate my lunch on the toilet, hidden inside of a bathroom stall in the basement girls’ locker room, safe. 

            The basement is also where they’ve shoved the counseling department at my school. I “go there” now. My Creative Writing teacher read a poem I wrote about digging my own grave and then saw the scratches on the tender parts of my arms. Each week I talk about what makes me angry. Sometimes I make things up for shits and giggles. Other times I tell myself I’m joking but I’m not—like when I tell the woman how hard it is to wake up sometimes. Most days, I lay in bed for hours before I can get myself out of bed. I have to set my alarm for five in the morning and give myself a daily pep talk before I can crawl out of my blankets and throw clothes on. Some weeks I don’t shower because it’s too much work. Instead I slab deodorant over the corners of my sagging body and sprinkle the grease mop of my ratty hair with baking powder. I call this Success.

            Have you ever heard of depression, Nana Dee? My mother has it. Her mother had it. Now I have it. Depression is kind of like a veil that you can’t ever seem to take off, making everything look darker and scarier from underneath. Its cloth is heavy and seemingly endless; it drags and drags and drags over my homework, to-do lists, my friends, and all the things I used to love. The Counselor says that one day I won’t have to wear this dreadful veil, that one day I’ll learn to see through it clearly, as if it weren’t there at all. I don’t believe her.

            When the homework’s done and the food’s done swirling in the toilet and all is quiet, I lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and daydream about the future. In college, I’ll have all of this sorted out—the veil, the food, the fat. I will eat salads and not think about the one to come. I will exercise for fun. I will make friends and smile and feel able to love them. I’ll kiss a boy or a girl and it will feel right. Everything will feel okay. At night I won’t count sheep for hours or think in circles until my brain’s too tired to keep going. Instead, I will sigh softly and close my eyes. That’ll be the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a sigh.