is waif
FATHER WORE ROUGH KHAKI UTILITY SHORTS ON THE WEEKEND
The khaki shorts:
Father wore rough khaki canvas utility shorts on the weekend. He was a khaki sandwich, with a matching khaki-colored hat on his head (the top of which grew more exposed with each passing year). A gray t-shirt was the center of Father’s gravity, the meat of the Father sandwich. Sometimes he swapped out the gray t-shirt for a white one with an illustration of a fir tree on it.
Yavis spent her childhood collecting notebooks with an untoward fervor. She ripped through the pages with a pen or pencil in her tight grip. She wrote stories and drew pictures phonetically. She plowed through her relative illiteracy and her dearth of talent. When she didn’t care to write, she drew pictures —of women and of clothes and of women in clothes.
issue 12
The khaki hat:
Yavis liked to stick her face into Father’s khaki hat and inhale deeply. She would open her eyes and little gullies of light streamed through the holes provided by an outdoor outfitter to cool Father’s head. Too bad he was already a bit of a hothead! Yavis traced the sweat stains with her eyes. His hat smelled (and tasted) like salt.
Sometimes she slipped the hat on her own head. It nearly fit. In math class in the third grade an evil teacher took a measuring tape to Yavis’s head and wrote its circumference on the chalkboard. The teacher proceeded to measure the waist of a minuscule boy named William. Her head and his waist were the same size.
Yavis got her big head from Father. Both their heads were filled to the brim, with what, no one was quite sure. Yavis inherited Father’s strange reverence for women. His version of this affliction led his eyes to wander, especially in yoga class. Yavis kept her hands to herself and spent her days imagining the women there could be and that she could be.
She collected magazines for Father to put in the waiting room of his medical practice. She pulled a wagon behind her and walked up and down the streets of the neighborhood. She felt like an ant. She went door to door. The sidewalk spread before her like a pavement runway. She brought the magazines back to her room, where she carefully removed the address labels and stacked them in neat piles. Issues of National Geographic formed a wobbling yellow tower on her bedroom floor. Every copy of The New Yorker was invariably warped by bathroom dampness. She tried to smooth out the pages.
Her favorites were the fashion magazines. These she flipped through for hours. She stared at pictures of elegant clothes and even more elegant women. She pondered the pronunciation of words— fashion words like Givenchy and haute couture. Certain pages grabbed her. These she tore from the magazines,
slowly pruning them till they were all spine. She cut out pictures of outfits and stockpiled them in a folder.
The cut-outs were on her mind when she turned to her notebooks. She drew figures that looked like they too had been cut out— given edges and features and faces—with a child’s dull scissors. Drawing after drawing of duck-footed, grasping v-necked, protruding pony-tails. Every day she hounded after a new shape: a sweet-heart neckline, a strand of pearls, a pleat or an argyle, flat shoes that turned left, high-heeled shoes that turned right, big noses, small noses, faces in profile or no faces at all. These were her ladies. Her women!
Yavis’s parents complained that she spent too much time alone. “Take in the world around you!” they said. They insisted that she look out the window of the car. It was through that very window that Yavis’s Game Boy ultimately went flying. Her saintly mother grew leery of her daughter’s twiddling thumbs. Yavis mostly played Mario to look at Princess Peach anyway. The Game Boy’s passage from car to bushes was no sweat off her back!
Outdoor activities were imagined and orchestrated for Yavis’s pleasure and erudition.
The waders:
Yavis wore Father’s extra set of waders: big boots with overalls attached. An outfit with very strong lines. An outfit in a dark grayish green. Yavis had big feet and she nearly matched Father in height, but the waders ballooned around her. They deflated as she stepped waist-deep into the creek that wandered through the backyard. She liked the feeling of being wet-but-dry.
The black quarter-zip fleece:
He wore a black quarter-zip fleece compulsively. It was a fixture of his off-duty look. It was made of a thin fleece that stiffened every time it went for a rumble in the washing machine. For most of Yavis’s life, it was hardly soft at all. Little knobs of fleece (they looked like taste buds or sea anenomes) prickled her cheek when she laid her head against his protruding belly. The fleece was flame retardant. Father was always setting it on fire, but the material resisted his most pernicious advances. The fleece was covered in small perfect burn holes.
The fleece-lined leggings:
More fleece! Father decided that Yavis and the children ought to cross-country ski. They piled into the car and went to buy hats, gloves, fleeces, scarves, wool socks, and fleece-lined leggings that had a rubbery finish to them. The boys refused to wear the leggings, but Yavis agreed because Father wore them too. Father looked something elfin when he yanked his on.
The apiary suit:
The family decided to keep bees. Father went out and bought thousands of bees. Yavis was named assistant! The bees kept running away. Father and Yavis grabbed buckets and a ladder and slipped into baggy white cotton/polyester suits. They put veils on. They put gloves on. Father climbed a ladder and hewed a branch. Clumps of bees fell into the bucket that Yavis held aloft. She couldn’t see much through her veil. One time a bee flew into her shoe and stung her foot.
The flannel shirt:
When she wasn’t drawing women and clothes, Yavis tried and failed to draw horses. She could never get the proportions right. Father drove her up north every Saturday and dropped her off by the side of the road. Then he would drive off and she would eat his dust! She wore a flannel shirt that he said was practically a family heirloom. When she wore the flannel, she was handed a shovel and she shoveled horse manure. As a reward, she was tossed upon a horse’s back and was allowed trots around a fenced-in ring.
One time Yavis wrote a big long story. The story was about two girls who were royal somehow. They wore frocks and their hair curled naturally into luscious waves. When Yavis wrote the beautiful, royal girls into existence she planted the seed of a new anxiety—how did people in the “olden days” see without glasses or contacts?
(This newly articulated quandary sprouted, in turn, other perplexing questions: How should she categorize the various phases of the olden days that she could picture in her mind? What was to distinguish the olden days where people wore corsets from the olden days where people drove Ford Model Ts?)
To calm herself down, she made sure to note in the story that both girls had perfect vision. This allowed a breath to escape from her gritted teeth. No one wore glasses in her world!
The girls with the tousled hair and the impeccable vision liked to look at each other. They liked to touch each other too. In the story’s dénouement, the girls ran through a forest and collapsed in a tizzy at the foot of a tree. The heavy fabric of their skirts flounced, filled with air, and became tents. Breathing heavily and laughing hard, their gowns afloat, the girls’ limbs became entangled and their fingers grew damp.
The frock:
Yavis had dresses. She had skirts. She had tights that twisted into fabric snakes and sprinkled the air with dust. But what she wanted was a frock. She collected scraps of fabric and she held an invisible needle between her thumb and forefinger. She dipped her weapon up and down. Being invisible, it had no capacity for puncturing, so it just bulldozed backwards and forwards endlessly. She squinted her eyes and she didn’t see hideous synthetic-flannel plaid in putrid blues. No, she saw damask and duchesse satin and hammered silk in tones of apricot, peach, nectarine, cherry—every stone fruit she could imagine or taste on the porch in the summer, fruity juices trickling down her
stumpy fingers.
The Puritan:
Her middle school history teacher confided in Father. She said Yavis was like “a Puritan with her Bible.” This was a compliment! Father reported back to Yavis with a twinkle in his glasses. Yavis could just about feel a starched white collar, black wool sleeves, thick stockings, the shoes made of wood, a pair of bloomers (a la Shirley Temple) encasing her thighs.