Tully

‘I am plain,’ she said. Plain. ‘Plain Tully, that’s what they call me.’

But I look all right now. The red blouse’s nice (to match my red lips). But tight. Pants are tight, too. She’ll never let me out again if she sees me. Seventeen and a half, but just too young to go out, just too young to go. Tully snickered. Now, isn’t that just the biggest joke in the Grove. Ah, yes, but I’m so safe here at home. Why, this is the safest place.

Tully found a toothpick. A party! How many people? How many of them guys? How many on a football team? Nice going, Jen. She smiled. Jennifer even promised there might be some guys at the party Tully – remarkably enough – did not know.

Tully started making friends with boys when she was around thirteen, going to a bunch of boozeless kiddie parties. Then boozeless kiddie parties started to bore her silly, and when she was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen but looked nineteen, twenty, twenty-one and had the ID to prove it, she went around with a wilder crowd. Most of the girls she hung out with were not in school anymore. Some were pregnant, all were husbandless. Some were still in school but truant; many were in foster homes. It all seemed kind of fun at the time. Nothing quite like a dozen kids, running around the Midwest, going to College Hill, drinking beer, dancing on the tables, smoking pot, having a good ol’ time. She got to know some older boys then, too; some college students. They looked like men and talked deep like men, but when it came to wanting to touch her, they had no self-control, just like boys. Mother did a lot of sleeping back in those days and didn’t mind Tully’s going out. After working hard for the Topeka refuse plant every day, who would have the energy for anything but sleep? Tully had been telling her mother she was sleeping over at friends’ houses since she was thirteen, knowing Hedda Makker would always be too tired to check. That’s what it was, thought Tully, as she ran a pick through her frizzy hair. She’s always been just plain too tired to ask me where I’ve been.

The younger boys and the older boys had all watched Tully dance, danced with her, and cheered her when she danced alone. They came up to her, they bought her drinks, they laughed at her jokes. All those boys who kissed her told her she was a good kisser; who fondled her told her she had a good body. Tully scoffed but listened to them all the same. And some had come calling for her in the following few days but did not stay long, disheartened by the stares of her mother and her Aunt Lena, or by the condition of the beaten-down house in the Grove with a broken front window, broken during Halloween of 1973 and boarded up ever since. Or disheartened by the Grove or by the railroad or by the river.

In many ways, Tully minded Topeka more than the Grove itself. Oh, it was just a town, a small, subdued green capital town, with empty streets and lots of cars. But when the town ended, and quickly end it did, after a narrow street, or a road that suddenly became a hill, there was nothing but the prairie stretching out ad infinitum. Fields and grass and an occasional cottonwood, all on their way to nowhere, windblown, ravaged by fires, never broken up by an ocean or even a sea. Just pastureland, millions of miles long, seemingly up to the sky, westward, outward, onward, to absolutely nowhere. Tully never felt more intensely confined than when she thought about the vastness beyond Topeka.

For sure, there were other nearby towns. Kansas City bored her. In Manhattan, there was nothing to do. Emporia and Salina were smaller than Topeka. Lawrence was a university town. Wichita she had been to only once.

The Grove emptied out on the western side into Auburndale Park, right next to the Kansas State Hospital with its Menninger facility for the insane, and on the eastern side into Kansas Pike. Fortunately, the Grove was too far a walk for most of the boys who got interested in Tully. It was just as well. Most of the boys Tully met were not to her mother’s taste.

When Tully was sixteen, all the ‘staying over at friends’ houses’ had stopped. Hedda Makker, having been too tired for years, suddenly expressed interest in the contents of Tully’s desk and found some condoms. Tully swore up and down that they were given to her as a joke, for balloons, that she knew they were bad but didn’t know what they were. It was to no avail. The ‘sleepovers’ stopped. That was a shame. Tully had made a lot of money on those dance contests up on College Hill.

Tully went nowhere for six months, except Jennifer’s and Julie’s, and when she had turned seventeen last year, her Aunt Lena came with her. Loud, laughing, partying teenagers, who drank Buds and told dirty jokes and sang the Dead, and Aunt Lena, sitting in some corner like a fat mute duck, watching, watching, watching her.

Not being able to go out and party, Tully, who for years had tried to shut out her childhood friends, reluctantly returned to the Makker/Mandolini/Martinez circle. They became known around Topeka High as the 3Ms. They were always together again, but it wasn’t the same. There were…things they did not speak about.

And they never slept outside in Jennifer’s backyard anymore, like they used to when they were kids.

Tully kind of missed that. But at sixteen, she missed College Hill more. Missed the dancing.

Tully was not allowed to stay out past six o’clock on school days or weekends. Last February, Tully stayed an extra few hours at Julie’s. Upon her return, at six-thirty, she found all the doors and windows locked. No amount of banging and crying made Tully’s mother shift from her TV chair before the eleven o’clock news ended. Hedda must have fallen asleep on the couch like always and forgot all about Tully.

In the summer before Tully’s senior year, Hedda Makker loosened up. But Tully suspected Mother had simply become too tired again to watch over her.

Tully called the summer of 1978 her ‘a-storm-a-day summer.’ It had not been a good summer. She watched a lot of ‘All in the Family’ and ‘General Hospital.’ But even sunny summers were a drag in landlocked Topeka. The girls managed to get to Blaisdell Pool in Gage Park once or twice. Tully went to a number of barbecues at Julie’s and Jen’s and read – a lot, all trash.

The girls celebrated Julie’s eighteenth birthday a month ago in August, with Aunt Lena pleasantly in tow.

Tully’s bedroom door opened.

‘Tully, it’s after six, are you ready to go?’

‘Yes, just brushing my hair.’

Hedda Makker came near and ran her hand over Tully’s frizzy locks.

‘Mom.’ Tully pulled away, and so did Hedda, looking her daughter over.

‘Your hair looks awful. The roots are growing out.’

‘Yes, I know, thank you.’

‘I’m only telling you because I care about you, Tully. No one else would care enough to tell you the truth.’

‘Oh, I know, Mom.’

‘I don’t have the money for your hair, Tully.’

‘I know,’ Tully said harshly. Then, ‘Mrs Mandolini will need me to clear up all the leaves soon,’ a little milder.

‘So will I.’

But will you pay me, Mother? thought Tully. Will you pay me to clean up your leaves and dance on your table?

‘I’ll rake them soon, okay?’ Tully said, her mouth stretching into a nominal smile. Hedda stared at her daughter and said, ‘You should let your natural hair grow out. It looks terrible now.’

‘Mom, I get the picture.’

Hedda squinted at Tully in the dim light. ‘Tully, you are wearing too much –’

‘Makeup,’ Tully finished. ‘I know.’

‘Tully, I know you know, you tell me you know, but you don’t put any less on. Why?’

‘Because I’m ugly, Mom, that’s why.’

‘You aren’t ugly. Where’d you get that idea from?’

Tully looked at her mother’s drawn, broad face; tired eyes the color of mud; lank hair, roughly the same color; thin, colorless lips.

‘Mom, I’m plain.’

‘But Tully, when you wear so much makeup, do you realize how you look?’

‘No, Mom,’ said Tully in a tired voice. ‘How do I look?’

‘You look slatternly,’ said Hedda. ‘You look cheap.’

‘Do I?’ Tully stared at herself in the mirror. Now be very, very quiet, Tully Makker, she thought.

‘Yes, you do. And when you look cheap, boys will think you are cheap, they will come on to you and treat you with no respect. And boys your age, they can be very…’ here Hedda paused, ‘persistent. You may not be able to fight them off.’

Fight them off? Tully thought. ‘Yes, Mom, you know, I think you’re right. Maybe I am wearing a little too much makeup.’ And taking a cotton puff, Tully began to vigorously rub her face.

Hedda stared at her. ‘Are you humoring me, Tully?’

‘No, of course not, Mom, I just don’t want to upset you.’

Hedda said nothing, turning to go. Tully got up out of her chair, then immediately sat back down when she saw Hedda looking at her leathers.

‘Tully, what’s that you’re wearing?’

‘Nothing, Mom, nothing. Just some pants I bought.’

‘Bought? Bought with what?’

With Jennifer’s money. ‘I did some work for Mrs Mandolini, and she gave me a little money for it.’

‘And this is what you bought with her money?’ Hedda’s voice was extremely quiet. She turned on the overhead light in the room to see better.

With my money, thought Tully, saying, ‘Mom, they are just leather, that’s all.’

‘Just leather? Just leather? Do you realize how you look in them? Look!’ And she yanked Tully by the upper arm out of the chair and stood her in front of the mirror. ‘Look! How do you look to boys and to girls? How do you look to Jennifer’s parents? Do you know what they’ll think of me for letting you wear something like this to their home?’

Jen and her mom helped me pick these out, Tully thought. ‘Mom –’

Hedda wasn’t listening. ‘I know what they’ll see. Here’s a girl, a young girl, with bleached permed hair, roots showing. Bright red blush, bright red lipstick, eyes covered with black and blue gop, and those pants. And that shirt.’ Hedda’s voice was stone cold and dead slow. ‘That slinky red shirt, with the first button right between your tits!’

‘Mom! Please!’

‘Are you gonna be…bending over a lot, Tully?’ asked Hedda menacingly. ‘Are you…wearing a bra, Tully?’

Tully threw her hand to the top of her blouse, but too late – Hedda got there first, pulling Tully’s shirt away from her body to reveal two pale, moist-with-sweat breasts.

Hedda’s eyes narrowed and Tully’s widened.

‘Mom, I only have two bras and they were both dirty. I couldn’t wear them.’

‘Shut up, Tully Makker, shut up.’ Hedda’s voice was as slow as before but an octave higher.

‘Who else besides you would know that your two bras were dirty, who?’ Hedda paused, panted, then sprung again. ‘Are you wearing any panties, Tully?’

‘Yes, of course I am, Momma,’ Tully replied, remembering just what she was wearing – a black G-string.

‘Open your pants.’

‘Mom, no.’

‘Tully, you are lying to me? I wanna know how far you stooped, what a dirty trash you become. Now open them.’

Tully uttered a small sound. And unbuttoned her trousers; unzipped them just enough to show her mother the top of her black underwear.

Hedda looked at the panties, then at her daughter’s face. She let go of Tully’s arm, finally, and Tully sank into the chair.

‘Get undressed. You aren’t going nowhere.’

Tully made an inarticulate, throaty cry.

‘Mom, please. I’m sorry. I’ll change. Please don’t do this.’

‘Tully, you’ve done this to yourself. You’re a tramp. My daughter’s a tramp. Where have I gone wrong?’

Tully heard her mother cracking her knuckles. ‘Didn’t I try to raise you properly?’ Hedda said. ‘Didn’t I try to put some values into you?’

Tully’s eyes were on her mother’s hands. ‘You have, and I am, I mean, I have good values, I am moral. Please, Mom.’

‘What you think your father would say if he was here?’

I do not know, mother, Tully thought desperately. I really don’t know. ‘Mom, I’m sure he’d accept my apology.’

‘Oh, you don’t know your father, Tully, you don’t understand how he thinks.’

Hedda’s face was purple-red, and her big German body was heaving.

‘Truth is,’ she continued, ‘what does it matter if you do what I want and wear proper clothes? Truth is, you want to go braless, you want to show off your tits and have boys pull off those leather pants of yours and see that piss-poor excuse for panties you got on. That’s what you want, so what does it matter if to make me feel better you do what I want?’ Hedda’s face got a bit redder. The little blue veins in her hands stood out as she clenched and unclenched her fists. Tully saw another question dawn in her mother’s eyes. Hedda sat on the corner of the wooden table and brought her face so close to Tully that Tully could smell the sausage and sauerkraut of Hedda’s dinner. Well, that’s about as close as we get, Mom, thought Tully, intensely wanting to move back.

‘Tully,’ Hedda’s voice was quiet again. ‘Tell me, are you a virgin?’

Tully moved her head away from her mother and looked down at her hands while the little droplets of sweat collecting on her forehead dripped into her eyes.

Hedda persisted. ‘I mean, all these years I kept you home and sent Lena with you wherever you went and forbade any calls from boys to this house, tell me, Natalie Anne, was I…too late?’

Tully finally gazed at her mother in cold disbelief. ‘Mom, what are you talking about? Have you for –’ and then broke off, looked down, and said. ‘No, Momma, you weren’t.’ Hedda placed her finger, thick as the sausage she had just had for dinner, under Tully’s chin and lifted up her daughter’s face. And must have seen the fear.

They looked at each other for a few moments, until Tully tried to drop her gaze again.

Hedda’s voice was calm, almost reasonable.

‘Is that what you wanna do tonight? You want some boy? Any boy in particular, Tully, or are you…mmm…not particular?’

‘Momma, really, honestly, I just wanted to look attractive. But I’ll wear something else, I swear.’

Tully noticed her mother had stopped clenching her fists and was cracking her knuckles again. Kneading each finger tensely, twisting and turning them until the sound came, the sound of logs popping open in the fireplace. Crack.

Nowadays, Hedda did not lose her temper often; Tully would attest to that. Most of the time it was difficult to get Hedda to notice Tully was in the same room. But when Hedda did blow, it was always prefaced by this knuckle cracking. Last time Hedda lost her temper was the night of the condoms. The time before that was when Tully was thirteen and got caught kissing some boy outside the front door. When Tully was younger, Hedda’s loss of temper was like Tully’s hunger: sometime during each day, Tully would feel hunger. And sometime, during the day, Hedda would lose her temper. Mother was probably trying to get used to living life on her own with an uncommunicative and unattractive child (‘Come here, you dumb dog! Come here, you unloving cow, and tell me about your day!’), and loss of temper was as random as clouds. Didn’t sweep the floor in the corners, left the frying pan on, broke a table (left too often on her own, Tully once decided to turn the coffee table into a slide), didn’t feed the cat (it died eventually; nobody fed it), pulled up Aunt Lena’s dress just for fun, didn’t take a shower for three days, and so on and so on.

Sweat trickled from Tully’s forehead steadily now, like syrup. When she was younger Tully had become inured to Hedda’s fury the way she had finally become inured to persistent lack of sleep. But in the last few years, she hadn’t seen much of Hedda and had forgotten a little. Now, too frightened to wipe off her sweat, Tully sat immobile in the chair and watched her mother.

(How did your daughter break her nose, Mrs Makker? By walking into a door, was her mother’s reply to the hospital nurse, and two years later, when Tully was nine and had her nose broken a second time, Hedda didn’t take her to the doctor and the nose healed on its own, though not well. Didn’t take her to the hospital again after that, not even when she chipped Tully’s front tooth with a phone receiver.)

‘Mommy, please,’ whispered Tully. ‘Please, I am so sorry, Momma, please. I don’t want any boy, I just want to see my friends, be there for Jen’s birthday, I’ll wear anything, please, Mom!’

The fist flew out and caught Tully square across the jaw, snapping her head backward. The other hand bloodied her nose. Tully’s only reaction was to wipe the blood off with the sleeve of her red shirt. She did not look up, and she said nothing. Hedda panted, hovering over Tully.

‘Do you know what your trouble is, Tully?’ her mother said through gritted teeth. ‘You don’t learn. That’s the trouble with you. You don’t learn at all. All your life, you knew exactly the things that make me so angry, but you still defy me. You know what makes me very angry is this sort of thing, this slut way you have about yourself, and still, after all this time, you throw it at me, you parade in front of me like the tramp that you are, flinging yourself in front of me, to say, “You can beat me, you can punish me, but I’ll still do exactly as I please, because I am a slut.”’

Hedda paused for breath. Tully said nothing but wiped her nose again.

‘Say it, Tully. It’s true.’

‘I won’t say it! It isn’t true.’ The fist came out, knocking both Tully’s hands from her face, striking her cheek and mouth, making her nose bleed again.

‘Say it, Tully. Say, “I am a slut.” Say it!’ Every letter enunciated.

Tully remained mute.

Another slap, this one with the other hand; her head snapped sideways, her ear and eye hurt; and another, hard on the temple and the ear again; Tully put up her hands to her face to protect herself and only succeeded in having them rammed into her bleeding nose. Then another, another, another –

‘All right, Mother, all right,’ said Tully inaudibly. ‘I’m a slut.’

‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘SLUT!’ Tully screamed. ‘I am a slut! SLUT! SLUT! SLUT! SLUT!…SLUT!’

Hedda Makker carefully, watchfully, looked at Tully with her lifeless swamp eyes. Her gaze was hard at first, but then it softened; Hedda seemed satisfied.

‘Tully, there’s no need to scream, but all right.’ She looked at Tully’s swollen face and said, ‘Go and clean yourself up. And put on something decent.’

Hedda reached out to touch her daughter’s cheek. But Tully flinched, and Hedda saw it. She drew away and left the room, rubbing her hands together.

Tully stood up and stumbled to the bed. For a few minutes she cried a dry, choking cry, then tried to wipe the blood off her face, shaking in her effort to calm down.

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, she chanted to herself. I must get ready. I’m allowed to go. Now get yourself together, Tully Makker, and go! Get up, Tully, just one push, you are up off the bed, you are okay, forget it, sit up, pull your knees up to your chin, bury your head and rock back and forth, back and forth and forget, forget, it will all go away, it will all go away, it will it will, rock back and forth, it will; just go on, Makker, go right on. Go on, Tully, don’t give up. Don’t give up because of her, Natalie Anne Makker. You really want to give up, don’t you? What? Do you think all the rest of your life will be an encore of this life? Well, if you think that, then give up, Makker. JUST GIVE THE FUCK UP. Or you can just count your sheep, Tully, one sheep two sheep three sheep. I understand: how can a bad pseudo-Catholic girl like you not give up finally? But cut this pathetic self-pity and get up and get dressed and go see your best friend Jennifer on her eighteenth birthday.

Tully stopped rocking eventually and breathed slower. No one to watch over me but me, she thought. Go on. It’ll be all right. This is the last year. Next year…just think! Hang on, Tully Makker, ignore her and hang on, until next year.

Tully came down the stairs wearing no makeup, a black loose skirt, a beige baggy sweater. All old. All worn a hundred times. She walked quietly past the sofa where her mother and Aunt Lena sat watching TV. Aunt Lena did not look up at Tully. Tully was not surprised. Aunt Lena usually did not look up after hearing the scenes from upstairs.

Tully put on her only coat: brown, gabardine, torn, worn.

Now she had to ask carefully what time to be home.

Aunt Lena looked up. ‘Tully! You look wonderful!’ she said. Tully didn’t answer. When taking into account Aunt Lena’s impression of the visible universe, Tully always reminded herself that her aunt was registered as legally blind. However, Tully very quickly remembered an episode three weeks ago when she was just about to go over to Jen’s for a barbecue and Aunt Lena asked her when she would be back. Tully didn’t answer, Hedda threw a cup of coffee at Tully, with the coffee still warm, and Tully ended up going nowhere, no barbecue, no television, no dinner.

‘Thank you, Aunt Lena,’ she replied. ‘I’m going now, okay, Mom?’

‘What time will you be back?’ asked Hedda.

Here it is, thought Tully. Again, deliberately trying to stump me, trying to make me pay, trying to make me make myself not go. How many times did I get stuck on this question because I couldn’t figure out what time she had in mind? There was no correct response.

Tully held her breath. It’s only a stupid party. Stupid party. Fuck you, I say, and I go upstairs and don’t go. I’ll see Jen tomorrow at St Mark’s. There’s never anyone good at these parties anyway. They are all so lame. Fuck you, Mother, I don’t want your fucking permission. I don’t want to go anymore.

Sweat collected under her armpits and trickled down her sides. But she did. She did want to go. And Hedda was waiting. Tully had to answer. The correct response was not dependent on any particular set time; there was no curfew time in the Makker household, there was only the barometer of Hedda’s mood that was certainly not helped by the goings-on in Tully’s bedroom a half hour ago.

Asking her mother when might be a good time was a bad idea. Hedda invariably said that if she, Tully, didn’t know at the age of (fill in the blank – Tully had heard this line from about seven) when a good time to come home was, then she certainly wasn’t responsible enough to go out.

Still, the question lingered in the air and needed to be answered. Hedda would not look at her. Hedda was waiting. Fortunately, Aunt Lena for once meddled to Tully’s rescue.

‘Will you get a ride, Tully?’

‘Yes, Jen’s mom will drive me home.’ That was a lie.

Tully looked at her watch. Six fifty-five. Come on. Come on. Come on.

‘Ten-thirty,’ said Hedda. ‘Now go.’

Tully descended down the porch steps and smelled the rotting leaves. Tomorrow I’ll have to clean them up, no doubt. She walked slowly and steadily down from the Grove to Kendall, and then, when she knew she was out of view, she ran.

TWO The Party

September 1978

Out of breath, Tully rang the bell with little hope of being heard and then walked right in. Look at this place, she thought, and immediately some guy ran? fell? out of the hallway, spilling beer on her and himself, too. She backed away with distaste; he got up halfway to apologize, saw her, and smiled. ‘Tully!’ he called, ambling up to her and grabbing her waist. ‘Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby…’

‘That’s nice,’ she said, trying to get away from his arm.

‘I’m not letting you go till you dance with me, Tully. We’ve all been waiting for you! But I get the first dance, and “save the last dance for me!”’ he sang.

‘I will, I will,’ she said, prying his arm off her. ‘Let me go change first.’