Click the above voiceover to hear this chapter read by Walter Rhein of I’d Rather Be Writing.
I kicked at the concrete, ancient and crumbling under my Oxfords, the clumps of dead grass nearly overtaking the sidewalk. Ahead of me Main Street forked, to the right past the perfect cookie-cutter homes ending at the fairgrounds; to the left toward town and the river. I picked at a scrap of Mom’s yellow legal paper in my pocket and rounded the corner from the high school and past our house. I enjoyed these after-school walks to the drugstore, picking up a few groceries for Mom, Daddy’s medicine, and if I had anything left over maybe a Snickers bar or a magazine.
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Big groups of kids huddled around the ice cream counter guzzling floats and milkshakes, holding hands, and talking louder than they needed to while they reapplied their cakey makeup and toyed seductively at plastic straws.
I didn’t have many friends, a few girls from a Bible study here and there, sometimes a neighbor kid, but I’d never been to a birthday party or movie night. “Too risky,” Daddy said. “That’s how kids get in trouble.” But I was growing now, seeing myself more as a woman in Mom’s infinite bathroom mirrors. I hid music magazines high on a closet shelf, coveting the models and their perfectly painted faces, tank-tops, and mini-skirts that hardly covered their giraffe-like legs and tiny waists. And they all had such flat chests, which I didn’t totally understand but found myself wanting, too. I had none of these things, shaped like an overly-ripened pear with poor posture, my chest too big, everything out of proportion on my short and stocky frame. I hadn’t become self-conscious until the summer after 7th grade, when girls started to strip down at the pool, eliciting perky reactions from the boys as they ran for the cold showers. I watched it all play out, floating like a lifeless clump of flotsam in the shallows.
I pulled out enough cash for a large green bottle of Palmolive and Daddy’s water pills and handed it to the woman behind the counter.'
Ugly, I sniffed, staring at my freckles and puffy eyes in the drugstore bathroom mirror. The permanent rouge in my cheeks always made me look sweaty and tired, sticking out over top the endless buttons—Daddy’s choice that I be styled like a compound sister-wife; said it kept me modest. And he was right, no boy would ever think of touching such a tightly-wrapped package. Focus on your studies. Be the weird girl; weird girls never get into trouble. I bit my lips, a trick I’d learned in one of Mom’s magazines.
I walked the same route home I always did, past the bank, the library, and the Garage, but today I took my time. The jukebox in my head shuffled through jazz standards as my feet walked in time to the beat along the ever-crumbling sidewalks that sank low into the street, and I thought about the girl in the mirror. She wanted to wear heels (or at least Chucks), to rub sandpaper on the knees of her jeans at night. Maybe her dad didn’t tell her what to do. Maybe he smiled a lot, waved as she climbed into boys’ Jeeps and sped off toward the railroad tracks. She smoked cigarettes and drank beer with her friends. Grades didn’t matter. Wild women don’t worry, wild women don’t get the blues...
A shrill whistle shook me from my reverie, and I turned to see a kid in a dirty blue overalls. Behind him a neon sign fizzled “OPE,” the N long since gone, and a faded aluminum placard read “Mitty’s Garage.” Another guy yelled at him to get back to work. Looking down I tried not to smile but slowed my gait, enjoying the attention. No one had ever whistled at me before. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder, but I could hear them, laughing and cussing as they banged on the hood of an old Chevy, and hoped the “grease monkeys,” as Daddy called them, were talking about me.
Shuffling again, the jukebox switched to something a little more rock-and-roll.
Like most days after school I spent the afternoon alone in my room, finishing homework and staring up at the mottled brown papered ceiling, peeling from the corners. Cobwebs stuck to the paste underneath leaving dark, smudgy streaks that wouldn’t wipe away, and I thought about how many generations of spiders must have come and gone. I traced my fingers along the seams of the quilt, stopping at familiar moth-eaten holes, twisting the knots into little balls.
My body felt uncomfortable lately, kind of tight from growing too quickly in all the wrong places. I stretched my toes, sliding my hands across my stomach and down to my hips, trying to remember what it had felt like to be skinny, the way I used to be. But lately everything plumped and squeezed and pulled--my breasts, my gut, my butt, even my face. Mom thought we should talk to Daddy about driving to Great Falls for some new school clothes, but we both knew it would never happen. Who needed expensive clothing when we had the Salvation Army three blocks away? Besides, Daddy liked the way I looked in the button-ups, telling me to do a little turn as he straightened my collar, and tracing the seams slowly down my sides with his moist fingers. “No room for error,” he’d say, resting on my hips. No room for air.
I looked forward to it every day, that split-second of attention, the rise in my chest that felt like heat and butterflies. He didn’t whistle anymore, not that he needed to, though some of the other guys did. Most were older, potbellied, losing their hair and teeth. But they didn’t care and waved their grease rags with blackened hands, “Afternoon sweetheart.” I never answered, puckering hard and looking nonchalant.
And the kid wasn’t a kid after all, upon closer inspection, but in his late-twenties or so. He always stopped to watch me, a wrench frozen in his fist as he followed me silently with his eyes. He had a mustache, but I could still see the boyish face underneath nearly hidden by a shock of greasy brown hair. His thin arms stuck out of a sleeveless pair of blue overalls. But I never slowed down to see more than a few details, only what I could with a quick side glance, a little molasses in my steps. Then at the end of the block I’d pick up speed and head for home, choking on the buttons.
“‘Then I saw a great white throne and...’?” I stared past Daddy’s immense shoulder and out the window at the Saturday afternoon I wished I knew. “‘Then I saw a great white throne AND...’?” he said again, leaning in until I could smell the hours’ old scrambled eggs and gravy. “Jesus, Fe, we’ve been over this a thousand times.”
“Oh, uh,” I squinted down at the open page in Revelation. “The white throne is - it’s, um...”
“Goddammit. ‘...a great white throne and him who was seated on it.’ Say it again, from the beginning.”
“’Then I saw a - I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it.’”
“Jesus. Okay. Book, chapter, and verse.” He slammed the Bible shut and stood back, arms folded across his massive chest.
“It’s Revelation,” I said sheepishly.
“You’re kidding. Chapter and verse.” I could actually still see a little gravy stuck to the stubble underneath his many chins, a snack for later maybe.
“Uh, Revelation chapter...25?”
“Fucking hell. There aren’t 25 chapters in the Book of Revelation. You don’t know any of this; I’m wasting my goddamn time.”
I hated Saturdays. Daddy kept me home to pour over the scriptures for the next day’s lesson and I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. Mom’s merciful deafness saved her from the same fate and Daddy left her alone for nearly the whole day. And if nothing else, I was grateful she could get away from his constant attention for a few hours.
Sundays were Sundays as usual—the heat, the noise, the hymns, flies in the grape juice—but at the end of Daddy’s sermon one Sunday I got up to play the piano and noticed a new face in the back row. It had been scrubbed so hard his cheeks looked red and raw, the tightly-parted hair sticking out behind big ears, his blue shirt starched and unmoving. He sat there looking stiff and uncomfortable, and I didn’t know if the people around him were family, but I knew exactly where I’d seen him before. He’d shaved, no mustache now, and was in my direct line of sight over the top of the piano. I tried not to look at him. I thought about the way he usually saw me, strutting by with pouty lips and pinned hair, two loose buttonholes, maybe three. But on Sunday mornings I was packed so tightly into my clothes I could hardly breath, my hair in a taut braid down my back, the picture of purity.
He didn’t seem to notice me thankfully, and I stumbled through “It is well with my soul,” hitting a few extra notes that hadn’t been there the last time. Daddy looked bewildered but kept singing, my hands sweating more than usual and leaving little brown droplets all over the keys. The hymn ended and Daddy led us in prayer, ending the service for another week as I ducked lower behind the piano.
I wandered through the pews, righting the hymnals and sweeping communion crumbs into the dustpan. I hadn’t noticed that the man was last to leave but could feel eyes on me, tickling the hairs on the back of my neck. He looked nervous, or maybe caught off-guard, I wasn’t sure, but turned and left as soon as we locked eyes. Inside my chest the fiery butterflies jumped and danced, but I focused on the cracker crumbs, licking my thumbs and wiping away sticky grape-juice spots on the pews.
June 20
He’s cute, but kind of old. Not old-old, just old.
I think I make him nervous.
School ended for the summer, leaving ample time to wander, and I offered to run more errands for Mom, sometimes splitting them up into two trips if it made sense, always taking the same path home. I’d saved up some extra money for eye shadow, blush, anything that I thought might make me look more adult, less like a stifled, pathetic Pollyanna. I could hide the contraband from Daddy pretty easily, who wouldn’t even let Mom wear makeup other than powder, though I thought I noticed a little color in her cheeks once in a while when he was out of the house. And Sundays were much more interesting now. The man from the Garage kept coming to church every week, carrying an old Bible in his grease-stained hands. He even smiled at me once in a while, and I smiled back, careful that Daddy didn’t see.
Monday afternoon I rounded the corner, biting my lips, and flouncing a little more than usual. As if he’d been waiting, the man popped out from behind the hood of an old green Dodge pickup, dropping his rag in the parking lot and slamming it shut. I could hear him breathing as he beat me to the corner, standing in my way and popping a cigarette into his mouth. The mustache had already grown back. In an awkward moment he reached out and handed me a cigarette; I don’t know why. Maybe he thought it was the only way I’d stay. It worked.
“What’s your name?” He puffed hard as he cupped his hands around a Bic lighter.
“Fe.”
“Fe? What kind of name is Fe?”
“I don’t know.”
I’d never smoked a cigarette before, as much as I’d dreamt about that “other girl,” and when I tried putting it in my mouth I snapped off the filter, the broken bit hanging from my deflating lips. He chuckled and pulled another one out of the pack in his shirt pocket. I bit down carefully this time—it tasted like raisins and wet newspaper, not bad exactly—as he flicked his lighter and I waited for something to happen.
“You have to suck it,” he said, and showed me, taking a long drag off his own cigarette. I sucked hard and regretted it immediately, white-hot tears stinging my eyes.
“Thanks,” I choked, when I finally caught my breath. He didn’t say anything, just stood there watching me like I might pass out, which I didn’t thankfully, but tried to smoke the cigarette quickly so I could go home and die. The tears just kept coming and I could see he was trying not to smile. After a minute he tossed his butt and grabbed the wet cigarette from my mouth, taking a long drag, then with a wink walked backwards toward the Garage. Thank God. I could hear them laughing as I hobbled away, trying to steady the spins.
My hands shook as I unlocked the doors of the church and closed them behind me, crawling into the back row and stretching out against the cool oak pew. I couldn’t get away from the taste of the tobacco. Sweat dripped down into my ears, muffling the quiet noises of the old church, and I shut my eyes to stop the spinning. I leaned over just in time to throw up all over the floor. The puddle of stale-cigarette-smelling vomit stretched out along the floorboards looking for cracks, and I lay there unable to move or care. It felt really good actually, the swirling in my head slowed down, and after a few minutes I could sit up and breathe again, unbuttoning my collar to dry the nausea sweat from my back and chest. I thought about how angry Daddy would be if he knew that I’d smoked, and I was glad, but I’d never do it again.
I finished cleaning up and mopping the floors, then splashed myself in the big utility sink up against the back wall of the church. I was more than an hour late, but Daddy wasn’t feeling well—water in his legs again—and didn’t say anything. He lay snoring in his easy chair, an empty tumbler leaving rings on the table beside him.
I didn’t sleep well that night, my dreams filled with strange dark figures. The man was there too, always laughing and handing me cigarettes and lipstick. He’d shaved again, his piercing blue eyes seeming to say nothing, and I felt an intense curiosity about him. I tried to ask him questions but he couldn’t hear me. He stood there smoking his cigarette just watching, confused, like he spoke another language. I woke to the rain pouring through my open window and quickly got up to slam it shut.
June 25
I can still taste wet newspapers.
Copyright© 2025 Eleanor Leonard All Rights Reserved
Ellie is an author, editor, and owner of Red Pencil Transcripts, and works with filmmakers, podcasts, and journalists all over the world. She lives with her family just outside of New York City.
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