Chapter Text
Dad wanted a boy, I think.
Well, he didn’t get one. He got me instead.
I don’t think he liked me very much. But then again, I wasn't particularly impressed with him, either. The one good thing the bastard did was teach me hunting, and teach me fishing. Mama pushed us to go often, since it was the one activity we could do together that wouldn’t end in us arguing. Mostly because hunting requires silence, over a long stretch of time. And for fishing, we might have been able to talk without scaring our game away, but we preferred not to anyways. It was better like that. In silence, I could almost imagine Dad and I getting along. Now, the silence in this house feels oppressive, sits like a weight on my shoulders and hurts my neck. If I don’t have the television or the radio on in the background, I’ll be with earbuds in, listening to my cassettes. They’re the one good thing I got in the city, anyway.
I never liked growing up in the city. I never knew how to talk to other girls, so they didn’t like me. And I wasn’t pretty, so the boys didn’t like me, either. I learned very fast how to play on my own.
It was only when my family visited my grandmother’s house that I felt… well. I didn’t feel particularly at home. But I felt as if I was at least not the most odd thing there. The people in the streets were not so dolled up and picture perfect like the city. These people were the kind that were more interesting to draw. Similar to the way I looked. A little awkward, a little ugly. Very human.
If I were to tell my Mama something like that (because I would never tell Dad) she would probably shake her head. This is why the kids at school don’t want to play with you, she probably would have said. You can’t go around saying strange things like that. They’ll be looking at you funny. I can’t ever tell what she would count as strange, so eventually I just stopped talking. Mama meant well. She just didn’t make much sense sometimes. She made more sense than Dad, at least. And she did show me gardening… and cooking… and mending clothes. Although, most of those skills I picked up were taught to me against my will.
My grandmother, now she’s the one who taught me the most important things. Over the summers I spent in her house, I learned how to make a phone call, how to make the least conversation possible, how to tell which six-pack has the most beer in the cans. I learned how to spend the whole day outside, the hot sunshine be damned, and run and stumble through yellow-grassed fields. I learned how to ask a stranger for directions back home when I got lost. Ask forgiveness, not permission, my gran would say behind her cigarette, and I would nod and learn how to leave a note for my sleeping parents before slipping out the door. Gone to the corner store. Back by 2. Those notes ended up being more useful than I ever expected them to be. Writing notes, after all, doesn’t require any face to face talking. Writing anything.
To think of it—when my grandmother died, my parents moved into her house. And then, when my parents died, I moved here too. But I’m not having children, so when I die, who will move in?