All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed.
“I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals.
But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!”
“We live on the Upper West Side,” I said. Geography meant nothing to Francine.
She was thirteen and sitting in her bedroom felt like being in the presence of a wild animal. She spoke flatly, tamping down whatever Southern accent she might have, wore bruise-colored eye shadow, and painted her nails matte black. Her bedroom walls were covered with bands I’d only vaguely heard of: Simple Plan, Good Charlotte, My Chemical Romance. Their images were cut from magazines or printed from school computers, all held up with Scotch tape, paper trembling in currents of central air conditioning. Below her oversized Taking Back Sunday hoodie, she wore tank tops and already had boobs. On her wrists, she wore jelly sex-bracelets, though I noticed she rolled her sleeves down to hide them whenever she was actually out in public.
“Guys grab at the ones that mean the thing they want from you. The black ones mean sex,” she explained to me, “and the blue ones are blowjobs.”
“What?”
“Blowjobs. Those are when you suck on a guy’s dick.”
I was only vaguely certain what a dick was, with little idea of what would happen if you sucked on one. “Have you ever done that?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. But I practice.” She didn’t elaborate.
After years of refusing the invitations of friends who vacationed in Florida, my parents finally felt obligated to say “Yes,” and left me at my aunt and uncle’s place outside Atlanta on their way. “Less than a week,” my father told me as he lifted my bags from the rental car trunk. My left ear hadn’t unpopped after the plane landed, and I opened and closed my jaw, barely listening.
“Just four days,” my mother said. “Four long days.” The whole trip made her antsy and irritable in the same way as waiting in line in the grocery store. She had a native New Yorker’s idea of the South, made nervous by such “conservative” and “backwards” people. Dad pointed out that she’d grown up on Staten Island.
My aunt and uncle’s house was a giant McMansion in a neighborhood full of them. Each looked cobbled from scraps of brick and fake stone and vinyl siding. Juliet balconies jutted from two-car garages. Pool pumps harmonized in backyards. The mid-August air was unbearable; nobody had trees and there weren’t any sidewalks.
Inside, photographs lined the wall beside the staircase, one of which showed me, fresh-birthed in a hospital crib. “Can’t get over you becoming a young woman!” Aunt Jane stared at me as I dragged my suitcase up the steps.
“Me neither!” I didn’t know what to do besides match her breathless energy. She showed me to the guest bedroom, where their dog, Pierre, spent most of the day. He was an old Bichon with perpetually wet, brown fur around his mouth. He hated me immediately, growling from his place on the bed.
“Oh, P, stop it! Be nice to your cousin.” Jane shooed him away. He scurried, wheezing, off into the hall. “He’ll get used to it. Maybe he’ll try snuggling with you!”
“Here’s hoping!”
Within minutes of my uncle returning home from his car dealership, we were gathered at the table, eating Stouffer’s macaroni and cheese. The small crocodile on Uncle Chris’s polo was askew; Francine later told me she’d unstitched every one in his wardrobe after being grounded for downloading music on Kazaa. Jane did her best to reattach them, and Chris still wore the shirts out of spite.
After sunset, my mother called to tell me they’d made it to Florida. “There was a snake in the condo. Your father threw a shoe.”
“And missed.” They took turns complaining over the phone about their accommodations, never asking how things were with me. After twenty minutes of me saying “oh” or “mm-hmm,” we hung up.
I found Francine watching an anime about pirates. “It’s really far along,” she said. “It’d be hard to catch you up on the plot.” Uncle Chris was asleep in front of one of their many other televisions. Aunt Jane sat at the kitchen island with a glass of wine and an issue of Better Homes and Gardens, staring intently at copper pots hanging above the stove.
I snuck through the sliding glass doors and out to the back deck. Night was no cooler than day. I pulled up a chair to the edge of the pool and watched a dead frog float from one end to the other. For the first time, I sensed I’d been set up for a lifetime of comparing everything to New York.
Once the others went to bed, I ventured back inside. Through the dark, I found my bedroom. I couldn’t figure out how to work the lamp on the bedside table, then cried for a while before realizing I had to pee and had no idea where the upstairs bathroom was. I panicked, shaking below the covers. Finally, seeing no better option, I squatted in a corner of the bedroom and went on the carpet.
In the morning, everybody blamed Pierre, who took a scolding from Aunt Jane with his head down, drool dripping from his tiny lips. Uncle Chris scrubbed the carpet with Resolve, leaving a bleachy splotch.
Breakfast was microwaved sausage and egg sandwiches, soggy and chewy. Aunt Jane had “so many errands!” so Francine and I got into her PT Cruiser with her and set off. The drive was all six-lane roads and chain restaurants. It wasn’t until we arrived at the mall that I saw a human being outside of a car.
Aunt Jane dropped us off at the multiplex entrance. “Napoleon Dynamo starts in twenty minutes—here’s money. France, I’ll text ya.”
The instant the car pulled away, Francine walked briskly through the mall doors, going in the opposite direction of the theater, texting on her cherry red Razr.
“We’re not going to the movie?” I asked, trying to hide my disappointment.
“No,” she said. “I already saw it. Mom just always forgets what I’ve been up to the instant it’s over.”
“Oh.”
“You can go, though.”
“It’s okay. I don’t really want to.”
“No, you should go. I’m meeting somebody.”
“Can I come?”
She sighed. “Look, can you just give me an hour by myself? Maybe a bit more? I can’t have some little kid following me around the whole time. We’ll meet back at this fountain?” She pointed at a bubbling monstrosity at the center of a large atrium nearby. People sat here and there at tables along its rim, eating buttery soft pretzels. I noticed a boy lurking among the fake palm trees. He stood with a hunch and wore baggy, black clothes, his pant legs criss-crossed by straps and a chain wallet. Hair dangled down over his face, but I saw his eyes lock on Francine.
“Meeting that guy?” I asked.
Francine looked panicked, then put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, I’m not telling you to fuck off because I don’t think you’re cool. I do. You’re my cool, New York cousin. You can handle yourself. But that dumbass doesn’t know that. He’s just gonna see you as a little kid. Though you’re not.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“And because you’re cool, I know you won’t say anything to my parents.”
“Of course.”
“An hour.”
“An hour.”
Wandering around, I realized that I’d never set foot in an actual mall. I found an FYE and browsed the CD racks, picking one up now and then and listening to thirty-second song samples at a headphone station. The whole mall smelled like floor wax, burgers, and perfume. Pacsun kids loitered in Pacsun; Hot Topic kids in Hot Topic. For a time, I wandered the dark recesses of an Abercrombie, holding too-big spaghetti-strap shirts up to my torso.
In the food court, I spotted Francine and the boy at a table, eating samples of orange chicken from small white cups. He held his hands out to her like he was begging for something. My cousin sighed and looked up at the skylights. Finally, with a tilt of her head, she gestured towards the restrooms, and the two of them walked together in that direction. The boy’s face was a grimace of nervous excitement; his slouch straightened. My first instinct was to follow them, but I didn’t. Instead I walked back towards the fountain. On the way, I saw a group of small children gathered around a Kiwanis Club-sponsored coin funnel, pennies circling as they slowly succumbed to gravity.
While my aunt and uncle slept, Francine and I watched Invader Zim in the den. Pierre lay at my feet; I’d brokered peace at dinner by feeding him a chicken nugget under the table.
“That boy you were hanging out with,” I said. “How old is he?”
“Ha. He’s forty-seven. He’s my math teacher.”
“Seriously.”
“He’s fifteen. Met him at Chick-fil-A a couple weeks ago.”
“I saw you and him going into the bathrooms.”
“Yeah?” Francine kept her eyes on the TV, though I could tell she was worried about what I’d ask.
“Were you doing drugs?”
She laughed. “Drugs? No. Not that it’s your fucking business.”
“Sorry.”
When the episode ended, Francine flipped to MTV2 in time to watch a Fall Out Boy music video.
“If you have to know,” she said when the song was over. “I was showing him my vagina.” My stomach went weightless. “He asked me to shave it for him, and he wanted proof that I did. So we went into a bathroom stall and I showed him.”
I knew about pubic hair from everything I’d seen on the internet, and had been wondering about when my own would come in, but hearing someone talk about the subject of their vagina so bluntly threw me off. “Did he show you anything?”
“No. He was scared. Told me to trust him, that he has a big dick, blah blah. Typical.” She turned to me. “Look, Marie. If a guy ever asks you to do anything like that, you don’t have to. If you don’t want. Don’t let him make you think it’s something you want, either. Okay? Just want whatever it is you want. Like, the minute I can get my nipples pierced, I’m gonna. But because I want to. Not for anyone else.” It was the most straightforward anybody had been with me about the matter of my body, or of the one I’d soon have.
“Alright. Thanks.” I wanted to hug her, demand she teach me more, but stopped myself.
Sometime after that, I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up, Francine had wrapped me in a blanket and left a glass of water on the coffee table beside me, which tasted bubbly and odd in the early morning.
On my last day in Georgia, it rained. We sat around watching daytime television. Francine scratched at her crotch. Uncle Chris clicked around on the computer doing research for a fantasy football draft, commenting out loud every few minutes about how slow the computer had gotten since it had been used for all that downloading. Aunt Jane puttered around the house.
“Alright,” she said just before noon. “We can’t sit around here all day. Summer’s wasting! If we have to stay inside, we can go to Babyland!”
“Jesus Christ, Mom,” Francine said, furiously typing text messages.
“Don’t.”
“Why would we want to do baby stuff?”
“Hey! Watch it.”
“Right, Marie?” My cousin turned to me. “We’re too old for it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t even know what it is.”
“Cabbage Patch Kids place. It’s like a theme park of dolls. Out in an even more boring suburb than this one.”
I remembered having one of the dolls as a little girl, with yarn hair and a blue dress. Once, I threw it up in the air the way I’d seen adults do with real babies and its plastic face knocked me in the face and split my lip. “I had one of those a while ago,” I said.
“See, Mom? We’re too old. It’s creepy.”
“What if I said that I wanted to go?” Aunt Jane asked. “Would that be enough? If I asked that you do something for me? Unless you feel like sticking around here with your father, hearing him mutter about pretend football.”
Uncle Chris didn’t turn from the monitor. “Please, girls, go. It’ll make her happy.”
“And we can have lunch at Bojangles.” Aunt Jane dangled her car keys off her fingers. Francine roused herself from the recliner with a sigh and I followed.
Inside Babyland, dolls stared impassively from their shelves. Little girls squealed and ran from place to place, picking up their new toys and bringing them to a small office where a woman dressed as a nurse made them take an adoption oath, fingers raised in the air, swearing they’d take seriously the responsibilities of motherhood.
Following the mass of mothers and daughters, we came to a nursery staged behind enormous windows, the glass smudged. . In bassinets, dolls wore cloth diapers. Aunt Jane looked delighted. . A mechanical stork twisted back and forth above our heads, beak chattering. When it faced us head-on, I saw that one eye blinked while the other stayed half shut like it was having a stroke.
Finally, we got to the central room. Most of the space was taken up by a fake patch of dirt. Doll’s heads stuck out here and there like ripe cabbages on beds of leaves. In the center of everything was a tree, a plaster monstrosity whose limbs reached up to the ceiling. In its trunk were round television screens where gestating doll fetuses were visible, floating in green-tinted amniotic fluid. Tubing snaked from plastic IV drips into different points in the soil, their sloshing contents labeled IMAGINATION.
“Have you been here before?” I asked Francine.
“Every couple of years,” she said. “I was into it before I realized how fucked up it all is. Trying to make women okay with becoming, like, breeding cows.”
“It’s just toys,” I offered.
“Not down here, it’s not.”
Another nurse appeared, speaking into a headset microphone. “Mother Cabbage is getting ready to have a baby!” She pulled out a large caliper and measured the tree’s trunk. “She’s five leaves dilated!” The doll heads writhed in place around her as she described a magic dust that fell invisibly from the branches above. “It determines whether she has a girl or a boy. Which are we looking for today?”
The crowd of women and girls shouted for a boy. The nurse stuck a plastic speculum into a space in the roots, and with feigned effort pulled from the depths a naked doll with a full head of hair and rosy cheeks.
“Looks like this one is gonna get a new home right away. ” She handed the doll to a nearby child who immediately held it close to her chest. Aunt Jane and the other mothers applauded.
When the birth was over, we slowly retraced our steps back to the entrance. I followed Francine in a daze while Aunt Jane lingered at the glass cabinets displaying the vintage toys, then insisted on buying me a t-shirt I knew I’d never wear. Out in the lot, a child melted down; somehow, her brand new doll burst a seam somewhere between the shop and the car, and stuffing bled from the hole, blowing in tufts across the asphalt.
* * *
It wasn’t until years later that I saw Francine again. She visited New York for a weekend right before I finished college. I met her at a bar near Penn Station. She dragged a suitcase, ready to head to JFK the moment we finished. Gone were the hoodie and jeans, replaced by a tunic dress and leggings; she’d stopped hiding her accent, giving her words a drawl I found musical.
I thought about bringing up that trip to Georgia, but couldn’t fit it into the conversation, not wanting to resurrect those girls we’d been. But I felt I owed her somehow. The advice she’d given me, while imperfect, was the first I’d been offered to guide me. By the time we met as women, I’d stumbled and fucked up plenty, and wanted to share it all with her as we sat, filling one another in on what we’d missed. If she lived closer, I thought, we might’ve been like sisters.
I haven’t seen her since, of course. A month after that day in the cafe, she met the man who eventually became her husband. They live in Boulder now with two children. They send me a Christmas card each year.
“Oh,” she said as she finished her drink, looking at her phone. “Plane’s delayed.”
“Huh. Well. Anything else you wanted to see?” My life, New York City, all I had to offer: it all seemed insufficient.
“What would you do with two hours?” Francine smiled, deferring to me, waiting for an answer, for me to open her world up in the way she’d opened mine.