x Tx - Normally Special

“We can go shopping for some new clothes when your belly fits back inside, Tinker.” She says this in a voice that I would like to punch. Also, it is hard to judge an infant, I know, but there should be laws against naming your baby daughter Tinkerbell if the baby’s father’s family has a history of obesity. Seven pounds, two ounces at birth turning into 160 at age thirteen on a 5’2” frame is a recipe for misery. “Bertha” would’ve been kinder.

The tank tops belong to last summer. My belly belongs to this summer. My mom won’t buy me new tank tops because she is cheap and also poor, so she is blaming it on me and my belly. I wear my cords because I won’t wear shorts because of my thighs. They are too wide for the style of shorts they sell now. My thigh flab bulges out from the too tight leg holes. I tried on a pair of light brown ones once and my thighs looked like upside down ice cream cones. The flavor they looked like was a sort of watery peach strawberry swirl, like how if those two flavors melted out on a white kitchen floor in long thick strips that looked exactly like my legs.

There is no way I am going to wear boy shorts or my mom’s shorts. She actually told me, “It’s stupid to wear pants all summer, Tinker. Why don’t you wear one of my old pairs?” Then she held up a pair of jean shorts that looked like a perfect light blue square. I walked out of the trailer and after the screen door slammed shut I heard her say, “What?” and then, to herself, “I like them.” I could picture her through the side of the trailer, holding them in front of her, against her straight waist, a square on a square. I kicked a rock at the dog and then walked to the Shop N Save to get a Suzy Q.

Even in my cords my thighs rub together. My pants don’t wear out in the knees first. Ever. And, if I ever ran — which I never do — smoke would wisp from the hot friction, especially in cords. Something about the raised stripes mixed with the valleys between them. Air flow mixed with fusion energy or something. I think we learned about it in science class but I sit in the back, in the corner, away from everything, not paying attention, so I could be wrong. There is a window in the back of that classroom that looks out toward the road. Across the road there is an old farm. Next to the farm there is a field. Behind the field there is a row of trees. Behind the row of trees there is another field and then another row of trees and then there is the mill pond. I go to the mill pond a lot and so when I sit in the back of class and Mister Lewis is teaching about fusion energy and molecules and things, I stare out the window in the direction of the mill pond and his voice becomes cicadas.

***

I take the long way to the mill pond now. Last summer I would take the shortcut through Mister Dean’s property because it cuts out almost a mile. I’d duck through the broken part in the fence that separates his property from the road and I’d follow the chicken wire alongside his east garden until it hit his cornfields, and then I’d walk through the widest row until I came to the end of it and go through the fence and down to the dried riverbed before following that to where the field for the mill pond started. If you kept going straight on the riverbed, you’d get to the outside of town and that’s where the Shop N Save was. Cutting through Mister Dean’s property was the quickest way for me to get to both of my favorite places.

He’d always be out there in his garden. I’d hear him first. Whistling and humming, whistling and humming. He wore a ladies straw hat and it would bob above the tomato plants like a lady was there picking the ripe ones.

I never really paid attention to Mister Dean and I didn’t think he paid much attention to me, until one day he was just there leaning against a fence post like he was waiting for me.

“Your name’s Tinkerbell, right?”

“Yes.”

“Where you going all these times you walkin’ ‘cross my property?”

I didn’t want to tell him the mill pond because I didn’t want anyone to know about my secret place, so I just told him I was going to the Shop N Save to get a drink.

“I got a drink,” he said. “I got Kool-Aid. Why don’t you come up? It’s hot.”

I looked at Mister Dean and then I looked at the fence post and then I looked at my feet and then the fence post and then Mister Dean again.

“You come up or you don’t come ‘cross my property no more.”

And because I dreaded going the long way and because it was really hot and because I didn’t know what else to say, I came up.

And that’s how I started having Kool-Aids with Mister Dean.

He had a real house with a porch that only had one chair. He would make me sit on the chair and he would lean against the porch rail facing me or he would sometimes sit on the stairs, sideways, so he could look at me. Mister Dean was about as old as my mom, I guessed. I didn’t like how I could always hear his breathing, this raspy gurgle. It never left him, even when he was speaking. It made me think of the cicadas at the mill pond and how their buzz never stopped, it just filled up the air like a jar. Mister Dean’s breaths were like that, but they never became part of the everything so that eventually you didn’t hear it anymore. His shirts bunched funny in the back and I wondered if he hid black filmy cicada wings under them.

I found out later he did not.

***

I don’t know why they call it a mill pond because there is no mill. Maybe there was one there back in the 1800s or something, but now there is not. I sometimes walk around in the brush around the mill pond looking for, like, relics of a mill. Ruins, I guess, pieces of something that used to be whole. Like old concrete slabs or stones or a broken turny-wheel for energy making, the ones on riverboats like they have on the Mississippi. Maybe some sort of old chutes that look like playground slides, but rusted. Big wooden beams with iron spikes sticking out of them. Big chunky things that look like they were put together with strong hands that knew how to make things that would last forever. They’d be broken but still strong. They would still look dignified, even though they were just old pieces of something bigger.

The brush is high in places and where there is no brush, there are weeds. I have looked as much as I can even though I might get bit by ticks or snakes. I just feel like I want to find proof of something that I feel is true.

I never do.

***

We drank the Kool-Aid out of jelly jars that were always dirty, but I never said anything. We’d sit on his porch and drink the Kool-Aid until it was gone. We would talk about things that people talk about when they don’t really have much to say to each other, water-treading things. I looked at my Kool-Aid a lot; some days pink, some days red, some days purple or blue. Sometimes he’d ask me how old I was even though I had already told him before. Sometimes he’d look at me for a long while and then say, “Tinkerbell…” like he was rolling my name around in his mouth, and then he’d shake his head and laugh a little. He mostly looked at me and did little nods. And breathe.

I must’ve said something about Suzy Q’s once and one day he brought me one with my Kool-Aid. I told him, “No, that’s all right.” And he said, “No, girl, you go on. Eat it.” And I said, “No, I’d better not. My mom…” and he said, “Your mom, what?” And I didn’t want to tell him about how my mom won’t let me eat sweets and how she hides all her cookies even though I always find them and how I heard her on the phone telling her best friend Avery how “Tinker’s just gettin’ so goddamn big.” And, so, I just set that Suzy Q down on my thigh for as long as I could, like it wasn’t delicious, like it was a turd or a dead thing, like I wasn’t sitting there wanting with every part of me to shove it right into my mouth. But after a while, I did. I ate it. I ate the Suzy Q. I couldn’t help it.