By Karin Cecile Davidson
Girl – October 1967
Rainey paraded down on us the year my daddy left. It was the year when Daddy traded in our family car for the red-and-white VW bus, Mama took to watching Peyton Place on Tuesday evenings, and I attached the gold stars for spelling around my dresser mirror. The Beatles asked us to sit back and enjoy the show from the stereo speakers in Saul’s room, and the central Florida sun lit up the house like it was on fire. It wasn’t like we didn’t all know change was coming, what with Vietnam breathing down my daddy’s neck.
On that October morning in 1967, Daddy put on his gray-green uniform and went to war. Mama put on her zigzag mini dress and went grocery shopping at Hull’s Marketessen, one of the smallest storefronts on one of the busiest streets in Anna Clara. That was where she met Rainey’s mother, Eva. Right in the middle of the produce section, mulling over avocados and melons, they had that dumb conversation about how to choose one. Mama chose Eva instead, dragged her past the checkout registers right out of the door and into our lives. It wasn’t like she was a replacement for my daddy; it was just one of those things Mama did, like marrying more than once, or bringing home a stray cat just because it had pretty eyes and then realizing the cat belonged to the Lingstrums around the bend. Not that Eva was a stray or anything.
Of course, Rainey came with her. Straight blond hair and these freckles that coursed across her nose like fine sand. She caught me on the upside of down. Now here was a girl I’d seen before. On the school playground. The girl with the pretty dresses and the charm bracelet that jangled when she moved. She wasn’t in my grade, but the one above. She’d shied away from me at school, but now I had her right in my own living room. “You know how to play Jacks?” I asked her. She cupped her hands and shook them, then lowered one in a pretend toss. “What about board games?” I pulled her into my room and showed her the boxes piled in one corner—Life, Mystery Date, an old Chutes and Ladders. She only shrugged her shoulders. “You know how to how to play any cards?” I figured she did. Of course, her answer was, “Go Fish,” but she said it more to the shag rug on my bedroom floor than to me.
Pretty soon, Rainey practically lived with us; Eva, too, when she wasn’t lounging on a beach somewhere, luring in the GIs on leave. I was thrilled. A friend, all my own. One who’d follow my every step, fasten her arm in mine, and stick to the rules. The way she said my name—“LuLu”—the L’s looping around inside her mouth, soft and undecided, made me want her as my friend even more. Right away, I just loved her to death.
Once, as Rainey slept, I scissored her long hair in half, and she woke up with the shoulder-length cut she should have had. Sure, she was surprised, looked at all the blond on her pillow and cried. My mama evened it up where it fell crooked, and then punished me for good measure. And Rainey got used to it. She got used to a lot of things around here. Like getting in on the action, even when there was no action and we had to make some. Spying on Mrs. Laurent next door, knocking over the Callahans’ garbage cans and blaming it on the Walbrights’ dog, promising to meet my brother Saul at the lake and then stealing his hidden stash of cigarettes and sitting up in the orange trees and smoking.
The road we lived on, Sybelia Drive, circled the lake and curved around big yards and driveways and houses that were mostly one-story. My daddy had built our house, so it was one of the newest in our neighborhood, all one floor with the citrus grove in back and a yard of live oaks out front. We lived on a corner, with lots of windows and sliding glass doors, and I told Rainey if she paid attention, she could see everything that went on.
Earlier version of “Girl” appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review, Volume 13.3, June 2011.
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Karin Cecile Davidson is originally from the Gulf Coast. Her stories have appeared in Story Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, Five Points, Colorado Review, The Los Angeles Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. Her awards include a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, a 2018 Atlantic Center for the Arts Residency, a 2015 Studios of Key West Artist Residency, a 2014 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a 2012 Orlando Prize for Short Fiction, the 2012 Waasmode Short Fiction Prize, and a 2012 Peter Taylor Fellowship. Her fiction has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net, as well as shortlisted for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers, the Nelligan Prize, the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, and the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition, among others. She has an MFA from Lesley University and is an Interviews Editor for Newfound Journal. Her writing can be found at karinceciledavidson.com.