Geri’s Diary

 

            This creek is too cold to even put your toes in. I bent down and just put the tips of my fingers in and shivered. It’s shallow but it crosses the road and makes it impassible after a heavy rain. It disappears around a bend, and someday I will follow it.

            On one side the creek is sunny and made for kids. The other side is all shadow. The snakes live here. Boys jump from the bank full of gnarled tree trunks. The water swirls with sticks and brownish spirals of leaf crumbs and trash.

If you go past the shadow side, the creek winds around the Walkers’ cow pasture. You can’t see it when you’re driving down the road, but the line of trees and the emptiness beyond them let you know that the creek is there. You can only see it again when the road curves back to the north and once again crosses over the water.

            I want to follow the creek to its end. The water will be cold. Cedar trees line the banks for miles. It must be miles. I don’t know how long that creek goes on—through this county and the next, into Cherokee, and then leaving Oklahoma altogether, winding its way into Arkansas.

I know how much of a shock the water is.

Past the shadow side and around the bend is place, only waist-deep, but it’s too thick with shade. You can’t see what you’re doing there. Everyone stays away, even couples making out. Besides, something happens to the wind where the creek curves to the east. It comes out of the trees differently. Or it doesn’t come out at all. It vanishes, like the light.

            The water is a shock. Yet you don’t want to turn away after you go in. I’m not afraid of snakes, but I don’t want to touch them. Still, there’s something attractive about how deadly they can be. The water is shallow. And I know how to swim. But when it’s so cold. When it’s winter, and you go on, your knees could stop working.

You could go slowly and something might still hold you back. Hands pressed against my stomach to stop me. Not pushing, just stopping me. A wall. A barrier. A warning.

 What do I do when someone holds me back? Resist. Resist.

 

“If it ain’t too dark out there for ya, yank that laundry off the line and bring it in!”

            Geri wiped the sweat from her forehead. It was stinging her eyes. She squinted into the darkness and could see Ganny’s outline in open back door. In that fading light, she looked like the little old woman who made the gingerbread man. It was the only book Geri had from her childhood, the only reminder of her mother, whose name was on the inside cover. It had been hers as a child.

            “Sure thing, old woman!” Geri yelled.

            Ganny snickered and the screen door banged shut as she went back inside the kitchen.

Geri bounced the basketball against the smooth dirt court she had made in the back yard. The ball slipped from her wet hands, and when she picked it up, stringy lines of dirt, mixed with her sweat, slipped off the ball like worms.

            She rubbed the ball against her t-shirt to dry it and then dribbled it behind her back—back and forth, not looking at it, not needing to. It was too dark to see it now anyway.

            “Most girls as tall as you can’t handle the ball that well,” Matt had said to her earlier.

He had been sitting on the propane tank with a giant glass of lemonade, watching her shoot baskets. Dirt flew up all around her, and it stuck to her skin.

“You look like a leopard with those dirt spots,” he added when she didn’t reply to the first comment.

            She knew he didn’t really care about her dirt spots. He liked to smother her in kisses even when she was salty from sweat right after a game. She was tall like him, with curly hair that was gold sometimes and red sometimes and always out of control. Her body was muscular, but she had curves and breasts so large that she sometimes wore two sports bras to keep them in check.

Sometimes Matt just liked to talk, not needing a response. Sometimes she was the same way. So was Ganny. Ganny had handed Matt the lemonade when he drove up. Geri never stopped playing.

            “Would you stop long enough for me to get a kiss?” Matt asked with a fake pitiful  voice. “Can you stop?”

She had eventually stopped but only gave him a peck.

            Ganny she loved. Matt she loved. But nothing held her focus like playing basketball. The sound of the ball hitting the dirt, thunk, thunk, thunk, got inside of her, as much a part of her as the beating of her heart. Coach Thorpe noticed it the first time he saw her.

            Ganny had her garden and her sewing. She had Geri, this great-grandchild no one wanted to raise. She could come close to crippling herself as she bent from the waist and swung like a pendulum pulling out weeds and popping off deadheads as she walked the rows of marigolds, runner beans, and radishes. An unneeded quilt took her months to piece, but she wouldn’t let it go until it was finished and folded carefully, wrapped in newspaper and stacked in the hall closet with the others.

She also has a kitchen rhythm. She made sandwiches with thick homemade bread and freshly-sliced ham with red onions and thin slices of tomato. She would put a sandwich on a plate and give it to Geri and insist that she eat it because Geri forgot to eat sometimes. Her best friend Bird was mystified by her ability to forget food. She told Geri she wished she could do the same.

Some nights, like tonight, Ganny stood at the back door and watched Geri bounce the ball, shooting into the darkness. The only clue the she had made a shot was the clank of the metal chain net against the pole. Ganny rarely said anything, but Geri could feel her there and know that Ganny wondered about her and if she would run or if the basketball would keep her at home. Ganny took her in when she’d run from everyone else.

I’m not going anywhere, Geri told her without words and hoped she heard. I’m not going anywhere.

The light from the back porch cast the shadow of the oak tree onto the side of the barn. Geri could no longer see the goal. There was no moon. The last of the spring’s barn swallows flew swiftly into the half-open barn door.

 

 

Granny’s Gardening Journal

 

March 23: There’s a fine patch of pigweed’s cropped up the east side of the barn, and there probably ain’t nothing to be done about it. Noticed where Geri’s trampled it down a few times retrieving her basketball. But pigweed’s tougher than old leather, and the only way to get rid of it is to get the shovel and dig up the roots and make sure you get every last one. I dug one up once that had a root an inch and half thick and was almost six foot long. I sometimes wonder if I should have had Warren put that goal on the side of the barn after all. Sometimes she’s out there playing long after dark, and she don’t seem to notice how the earth there is beyond bare it’s sinking in, she’s  making a hole in the way she keeps going over and over the place in front of the goal.

 

March 25: I got my seeds at the feed store today—cucumbers, beans, and tomatoes. Course, it’s too damn early to plant a thing. The flags and tulips are all up and ready for spring. The lilies are already coming out of the ground. Oh but it’s too soon. If they’ll wait a few weeks, they’ll look better with the warmer days and more sun and no threat of one of them all-of-a-sudden-take-your-heart-through-your-ribcage tornadoes or even just a gusty wind coming along to lope off their heads.

 

March 30: For some reason I keep thinking about Sister when I’m out in the garden. Today, Geri was practicing her basketball out at the barn like usual, and I was putting down some powder on the hollyhocks, which those damn beetles love so much that they don’t barely get to sprout a few leaves before they’re pocked with holes. And all of a sudden I thought of Sister because it struck me that I was up to my elbows in the cool dirt of the garden and behind me was the sound of the basketball thumping against the ground, and the feel of it was so familiar. And I must be starting to go mental because I stopped and looked over there at Geri and it was her I saw—with the length to her and that chest girls envied and boys goggled at and those long, long legs and the perfectly shaped nose. And the skill. The skill that caused her to leave us. The obsession. I dug up some hostas and spaced them out more evenly in the space along the front porch.

 

April 4: It wasn’t a tornado last night, but the wind was bad enough to knock over that old scarecrow been out in the south end of the vegetable garden for probably ten years now. She had a panty-hose filled with cotton balls for a head, and the cotton balls, all brown and stiff and peeling, are busted up and spread across the grass and stuck in the barbwire fence like moths in a spider web.

 

Chapter Two

 

Geri was only a freshman in high school, and Matt was a senior. She looked much older, being 5’10, wearing a 36C bra, looking at people with those eyes that had seen more than most fifteen-year-old girl’s. Matt would be off to college in a few months. But they had one last hurrah together--the senior prom. Ordinarily, Geri wouldn’t think of going, but she was dating a senior after all, and in small-town Fishinghawk, Oklahoma, in the year 1978, the prom was a big event.

            Still, she didn’t get around to telling Ganny she was going until a week before the night. She didn’t own a dress, much less a fancy one. Ganny immediately called up Warren, her nephew, and had him take her to Wal-Mart. Ganny had never learned how to drive.

She and Geri picked out a pattern and some purple satin-like material. It was the first material that stood out to Geri, and so she picked it up. Ganny’s eyebrows went up, but she said nothing and took it to the counter to be cut.

            Ganny had the dress put together in two days. It was a very simple pattern with spaghetti straps, a v-neck, and a zipper up the back. It had a skinny fit but flounced out at the bottom, and with her sandals on, the dress was a perfect length, just skimming the floor. When Geri tried it on, Ganny did a double-take.

            “Well, if ya were showin’ any more cleavage, you’d have to take a turn on the stage over at Wild Nick’s.”

            Geri blushed. “I’ll have to get a strapless bra. Wild Nick’s I can do without.”

            “No doubt. And let me see. I’ll look for some lace.” Ganny rummaged through her sewing box and came up with a piece of off-white lace. “I’ll put this in here,” she said, poking it into the neckline of the dress, “And that will be some nice camouflage.”

            “You don’t think it looks out of place?” Geri asked, afraid the dress already looked too homemade, even though Ganny had put it together with great care and the seams were perfectly done.

            “Nah, a little lace always makes a dress even prettier.”

The way Ganny touched her shoulder and looked at her made tears come to Geri’s eyes. Not for the first time, she thought of what it had taken for her to get to this woman, to this house.

Geri’s mom and dad divorced when Geri was five and her mom moved to California, leaving Geri with her dad. He was a man with little ambition so his job was one he could do or not do, depending on his mood—he owned storage rental units. He had been, as far as Geri remembered, a kind, though passive, kind of blurry man. In her memories of him, he is a thin, tall blur with brown hair perpetually going in or out of a car. He was always moving, always doing. He never stayed put, and it was ironic that his business was about keeping things to stay put.

When he married Sheila, Geri’s life changed dramatically. Sheila was a real estate saleswoman with a future plan that didn’t include Geri, didn’t include kids, period. She liked to make big sales and then spend big money on trips to the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, and almost anywhere away from Oklahoma—places for couples, not families. Before long, she had Geri’s dad on her side, and Geri was practically living with the neighbors that they left her with every time they went out of town. She ran away for the first time when she was just six.

What followed was years of bolting, followed by counseling sessions, followed by the removal of Geri from her dad’s custody, followed by foster homes, followed by running away from foster homes, followed by more counseling, and eventually a juvenile detention center for girls. Finally, a counselor at the center made an effort with Geri and found Ganny, Geri’s great-grandmother, who had agreed to take Geri in.

“I never heard of no twelve-year-old delinquent,” was the first thing Ganny said when Mrs. Muldrow walked Geri into the house. “Let me get a good look at her.”

Geri had been tired, hungry, and full of hostility. Mrs. Muldrow had practically thrown her into the car back at the home, and Geri had sullenly ridden all the way across the state, back to Fishinghawk in the northeastern part called Green Country, back to where her dad and apparently various other kinfolk still lived.

Now this strange old woman who Geri couldn’t remember ever meeting was holding out her arms. Geri was afraid she would hug her, but all she did was lightly place her hands on Geri’s shoulders and give her a good look.

“Hmm, yeah, this is one pretty tough customer,” Ganny said. “A redhead, that tells ya somethin’.”

Geri had wanted to protest—her hair was far from being red, but Ganny had silenced her when she fixed her with her sharp blue eyes. She might have been seventy-two-years-old, but those eyes could see right into her soul. Geri couldn’t turn away.

“Red like her mother’s,” Ganny continued, and then Geri did pull away. If Mrs. Muldrow had not been blocking the front door, she would have run straight out it.

“But not like her mother at all.”

Surprised, Geri turned back to Ganny, who then said, “Not like the woman insane enough to name a kid Tangerine.” Ganny’s sun-weathered face had gone cloudy, as if in anger.

Again, Geri started to protest, but Ganny seemed to guess what she was thinking.  It was the kind of name for some bouncy, round-faced little girl who entertained kinfolk at family reunions by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in patent-leather shoes.

“Insane enough to leave the girl behind for strangers to raise.”

Mrs. Muldrow apparently compelled by duty, spoke up. “Now, Mrs. Satterfield, the foster homes that Geri has been in have worked very hard”—

“Oh, don’t start a lecture on me about the social services. I ain’t makin’ a judgment ‘bout what you people’ve done for her or to her,” Ganny said, suddenly frowning and feeling behind her for the arm of her chair. She sat down and sighed. “It just don’t figure—how a mother could abandon her baby girl like that and”—

“Mrs. Satterfield, please, wouldn’t it be best to talk about that some other time?” Mrs. Muldrow said, looking anxiously at Geri.

For the first time, Geri wished Mrs. Muldrow would leave them alone. She had taken no offense in what Ganny was saying. She didn’t remember anything about her mother except some vague scenes of going shopping with her.

“Well, I don’t want to tell ya your business, Mrs. Muldrow, and you’ve known this girl longer than I have even though she’s my great-grandaughter, but I think ya can tell by lookin’ at her that we’d both be hard-pressed to say anything that would shock or offend her. Looks like she’s been around a little.”

Before Mrs. Muldrow could respond, Ganny coughed loudly.

“Can I get you anything, Mrs. Satterfield?” Mrs. Muldrow asked, when the cough turned into a mild fit. “A drink? Do you have some medication that you’re supposed”—

“Ah, now, hold on,” Ganny said, getting her voice back. “I’m perfectly fine. Fact I’ll probably be playin’ a fiddle over the graves of some folk half my age ‘fore ya know it. I got a little allergy stuff kickin’ up this time of year, gives me a cough.”

Geri had her doubts. What was Mrs. Muldrow or the State or both thinking by bringing her to this woman to live with?  I’d probably put her on her deathbed, Geri thought, the first time I did something she didn’t like. And how the hell am I supposed to do anything stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with this old lady?

She kept quiet though. She wanted to hear more of what Ganny had to say. At least she sounded like an old rebel.

“I’ve been livin’ on my own, here nearly twenty year now and I ain’t causin’ nobody no trouble, don’t pee on myself, and fix my own meals, do my own shoppin’, though Warren, that’s my nephew, has to drive me to the Wal-marts. I still do my own shoppin’.”

That was more than Geri could say for a few of the foster parents she had stayed with.

“Well, Mrs. Satterfield, Geri, I just want you to know that this is it. The next stop if you run away again, Geri, is the state girls’ home in Muskogee.”

“And that’s just one town away from the big Mac,” Ganny said, talking about McAlester, where there was a state prison. “Now if ya want to end up there, okay. Ain’t a thing I can do to keep ya out. But ya got a home here where somebody cares about ya, and ya need to stop this foolishness.”

Geri could see that Mrs. Muldrow was getting a bit frustrated. She probably really wanted to give one of her speeches about how we have to acknowledge the influence that past experiences make on our lives and vow to make conscious choices to reshape those experiences for the future, blah blah blah. Geri had heard it so many times, and she had a feeling Ganny wouldn’t put up with it. Plus, Mrs. Muldrow was probably dying to point out that the state prison in McAlester was only for men.

Ganny had one side of her dress wadded up in her hands, a gesture Geri would later learn, was one she always made when irritated or anxious.

“Now. It’s a good thing ya got that runnin’ out of your system. We’ll have no more of that. Ya wanna run anymore, okay, ya put on your sneakers and run up and down the road in front of the house about ten times. Ya run circles ‘round the yard, over the cellar, and back to the barn. Ya wanna run? Take off down to the creek and run right through the water. Run in your sleep if ya want. This damn runnin’ of yours is comin’ to an end now.”

Mrs. Muldrow put on her patient voice. “Mrs. Satterfield, it’s okay to have this kind of resolve, but experience has shown us that just laying down rules like this doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.”

“Mrs. Muldrow, I would kindly ask you to not refer to my great-granddaughter as a problem.”

Geri couldn’t remember what happened after that. When she thinks about that day, she’s still amazed that Mrs. Muldrow went ahead and made the decision to let her live with Ganny. Ganny had no concept of the psychological approach that Mrs. Muldrow swore by, but she had something else. She had common sense.

Geri ran away two more times after she moved in with Ganny, but eventually she stopped after she saw that Ganny was going to take her back and that she was going to get up in the morning and fix her waffles regardless. The second time she took her outside and watched her as she made her run up and down the road in front of the house. Geri did it because she liked running, and she wanted to see what would happen to her if she ran back to where she had started.

What happened was that Ganny gave her a glass of water and then told her to come out in the garden and help her dig up some turnips. Ganny showed her how to dig for them without upsetting the other vegetables in the rows around them. Geri had never been elbow deep in the dirt, and she found she liked it.