Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Well,” her uncle said after a while, “you're lucky that she don't suck 'em.”

“She couldn't suck 'em,” said Sissy's daddy, exaggerating. “She'd need a mouth like a fish tank.”

The uncle agreed. “The poor little tyke might have a hard time finding herself a hubby. But as far as getting along in the world, it's a real blessing that she's a girl-child. Lord, I reckon this youngun would never make a mechanic.”

“Nope, and not a brain surgeon, neither,” said Sissy's daddy. “'Course she'd do pretty good as a butcher. She could retire in two years on the overcharges alone.”

Laughing, the men went out to the kitchen to fill their glasses.

“One thing,” Sissy heard her uncle jest from a distance. “That youngun would make one hell of a hitchhiker. .”

Hitchhiker ? The word startled Sissy. The word tinkled in her head with a supernatural echo, frozen in mystery, causing her to stir and rustle the funny papers so that she failed to hear the conclusion of her uncle's sentence:

“. . if she was a boy, I mean.”

6.

THE SURPRISE of Sissy Hankshaw is that she did not grow up a neurotic disaster. If you are a small girl in a low-income suburb of Richmond, Virginia, as Sissy was, and the other kids jeer at your hands, and your own brothers call you by your neighborhood nickname—"Thumbelina" — and your own daddy sometimes makes jokes about your being “all thumbs,” then you toughen up or shatter. You do not merely stretch rhino leather over your own fair skin, for that would deflect pleasure as well as pain, and you do not permit your being to turn stinking inside a shell, but what you do is swirl yourself in the toughness of dreams.

It is all you care about. When the other kids are playing hopscotch or kick-the-can you go off alone to a woods near your home. There are no cars in the woods, of course, but that does not matter. There are cars in your dream.

You hitchhike. Timidly at first, barely flashing your fist, leaning almost imperceptibly in the direction of your imaginary destination. A squirrel runs along a tree limb. You hitchhike the squirrel. A blue jay flies by. You flag it down. You are not the notorious Sissy then; just a shy Southern child at the edge of a small forest, observing the forward motion of your thumbs, studying the way they behave at different velocities and angles of arc. You hitchhike bees, snakes, clouds, dandelion puffs.

In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization! You are an ignorant schoolgirl. You think civilization is a good thing.

Because of his thumbs, man can use tools etc., etc. But you cannot use tools. Not well. Your thumbs are too immense. Thumbs separate humans from the other primates. Your thumbs separate you from other humans. You begin to sense a presence about your thumbs. You wonder if there is not magic there.

The first time. . You'll never forget it. It's a frigid morning and a thin snow is filling the chinks in the wind. You don't feel like walking the five blocks to school. Over your shoulder you see — Oh you can barely speak of it now! — a Pontiac stationwagon approaching at a moderate speed. How you suffer through those false starts before your hand takes the plunge. Your bladder threatens to overflow. The sweep of your skinny arm seems to last for minutes. And even then you are passed by. But no — brake lights! The Pontiac skids ever so slightly on the snowflakes. You run, actually sweating, to its side. Peer in. Your face, beneath your stocking cap, is a St. Vitus tomato. But the driver motions for you to get in. .

After that you never walk to school. Not even in fine weather. You catch rides to the movies on Saturday afternoons (your first exposure to cowgirls); catch rides into downtown Richmond just for practice. You are amazed at the inherent, almost instinctive, precision with which your thumbs move through air. You marvel at the grace of those floppy appendages. That there were ever such instruments as thumbscrews bring tears to your eyes. You invent rolls and flourishes. During your thirteenth summer you hitchhike nearly a hundred miles — to Virginia Beach to see the ocean.

For one reason or another, you look up “thumb” in a dictionary. It says “the short, thick first or most preaxial digit of the human hand, differing from the other fingers by having two phalanges and greater freedom of movement.”

You like that. Greater freedom of movement .

7.

THEY CONTINUED TO GROW, the first or most preaxial digits of Sissy's hands. They grew while she ate her grits and baloney; they grew while she slurped her Wheaties and milk. They grew while she studied history ("As the settlers pushed ever westward, they were threatened constantly by hordes of savage Indians"); they grew while she studied arithmetic ("If a hen and a half can lay an egg and a half in a day and a half how long will it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle?"). They grew in the sour-smelling room where she slept with two brothers; they grew in the small forest where she played all alone. They grew in the summer when other things grew; they grew in the winter when most growing had stopped. They grew when she laughed; they grew when she cried. As she inhaled and exhaled, they grew.

(Yes, they grew even as millions of young Americans under social pressure and upon the instruction of their elders, struggled to cease growing; which is to say, struggled to “grow up,” an excruciatingly difficult goal since it runs contrary to the most central laws of nature — the laws of change and renewal — yet a goal miraculously attained by everyone in our culture except for a few misfits.)

They continued to grow, the first or most preaxial digits of Sissy's hands, and not quite in direct ratio with the rest of her growing-girl self.

If Sissy was fearful that they might grow on forever, that eventually they might reach a size that would put them beyond her control, that they might cause her to end up in a roadside zoo, third geek from the left, just across the pit from the Gila monster, she did not let on.

With no mental effort, she was expanding her breasts from bottle-stoppers to mounds that required material restraint. Without any help from her brain, she was beginning to sprout velvety hairs over that area between her legs that heretofore had been as bare and ugly as a baby bird. Lacking reason or logic to guide her, she nevertheless maneuvered her bodily rhythms into perfect synchronization with those of the moon, at first merely spotting her panties and then, after only a few months' practice, issuing a regular lunar flow. With the same calm and expert innocence, she pumped up her thumbs, ever lengthening the shadows they dropped on schoolwork and dinner plates.

As if intimidated by this rank and easy spectacle of growth — which, because they shared her room, they must witness in intimate detail — her brothers all but halted their own physiological progression. They remained their whole lives short and peanutlike, with baby faces and genitals of a size that women don't really mind but that other men often feel compelled to mock. Believing that old wives' tale about the correlation in scale of the thumb and the penis, locker-room anatomists sometimes suggested to the brothers that it was a pity they hadn't shared in their sister's digital largess.

Jerry and Junior Hankshaw would have been horrified had their thumbs assumed sisterly proportions; would have been horrified, for that matter, if their peckers had so enlarged. But a slight increase, a reasonable enlargement, would have been welcome, and indeed, after numerous clandestine consultations in the same scrubby forest where Sissy had learned her business, the brothers decided actively to seek it.