My mother’s boyfriend got a crush on me, so she
sent me to live with Daddy. I didn’t want to
live with Daddy. He had a weird accent and came
from Lebanon. My mother met him in college, then
they got married and had me, then they got
divorced when I was five. My mother told me it
was because my father was cheap and bossy. When
my parents got divorced, I wasn’t upset. I had a
memory of Daddy slapping my mother, and then of
my mother taking off his glasses and grinding
them into the floor with her shoe. I don’t know
what they were fighting about, but I was glad
that he couldn’t see anymore.
I still had to visit him for a month every
summer, and I got depressed about that. Then,
when it was time to go home again, I got happy.
It was just too tense, being with Daddy. He
wanted everything done in a certain way that
only he knew about. I was afraid to move half
the time. Once I spilled some juice on one of
his foreign rugs, and he told me that I would
never find a husband.
My mother knew how I felt about Daddy, but she
sent me to live with him anyway. She was just so
mad about her boyfriend liking me. I told her
not to worry, that I didn’t like Barry back, but
she said that wasn’t the point. She said I was
always walking around with my boobs sticking
out, and that it was hard for Barry not to
notice. That really hurt my feelings, since I
couldn’t help what my boobs looked like. I’d
never asked for Barry to notice me. I was only
thirteen.
At the airport, I wondered what my mother was so
worried about. I could never have stolen Barry
away from her, even if I’d tried. She was 100
percent Irish. She had high cheekbones and a
cute round ball at the end of her nose. When she
put concealer under her eyes, they looked all
bright and lit up. I could’ve brushed her shiny
brown hair for hours, if only she had let me.
When they announced my flight, I started to cry.
My mother said it wasn’t that bad, then pushed
me in my back a little so I would walk onto the
plane. A stewardess helped me find my seat,
since I was still crying, and a man beside me
held my hand during takeoff. He probably thought
I was scared to fly, but I wasn’t. I really and
truly hoped we would crash.
Daddy met me at the airport in Houston. He was
tall and clean-shaven and combed his wavy,
thinning hair to one side. Ever since my mother
had ground up his glasses, he’d started wearing
contacts. He shook my hand, which he’d never
done before. I said, “Aren’t you going to hug
me?” and he said, “This is how we do it in my
country.” Then he started walking really fast
through the airport, so I could barely keep up.
As I waited with Daddy at the baggage claim, I
felt like I didn’t have a family anymore. He
didn’t look at me or talk to me. We both just
watched for my suitcase. When it came, Daddy
lifted it off the conveyor belt, then set it
down so I could pull it. It had wheels and a
handle, but it fell over if you walked too fast.
When I slowed down, though, Daddy ended up
getting too far ahead of me. Finally he picked
it up and carried it himself.
It was a long drive back to Daddy’s apartment,
and I tried not to notice all the billboards for
gentlemen’s clubs along the way. It was
embarrassing, those women with their breasts
hanging out. I wondered if that was how I had
looked with Barry. Daddy didn’t say anything
about the billboards, which made them even more
embarrassing. I started to feel like they were
all my fault. Like anything awful and dirty was
my fault. My mother hadn’t told Daddy about
Barry and me, but she had told him that she
thought I was growing up too fast, and would
probably benefit from a stricter upbringing.
That night, I slept on a foldout chair in my
father’s office. There was a sheet on it, but it
kept slipping off, and the vinyl upholstery
stuck to my skin. In the morning, my father
stood in the doorway and whistled like a bird so
I would wake up. I went to the breakfast table
in my T-shirt and underwear, and he slapped me
and told me to go put on proper clothes. It was
the first time anyone had ever slapped me, and I
started to cry. “Why did you do that?” I asked
him, and he said things were going to be
different from now on.
I got back into bed and cried some more. I
wanted to go home, and it was only the second
day. Soon my father came to the doorway and
said, “Okay, I forgive you, now get up.” I
looked at him and wondered what he was forgiving
me for. I thought about asking, but somehow it
didn’t seem smart.
That day, we went looking for a new house. Daddy
said he was making a good salary at NASA, and
besides, the schools were better in the suburbs.
I didn’t want to go back on the highway because
of all the billboards, but I was afraid to say
no. Then it turned out that the billboards on
the way to the suburbs were for new homes and
housing developments. The prices started at one
hundred fifty thousand dollars – almost three
times as much as my mother had paid for our town
house back in Syracuse. She was a middle-school
teacher, so she couldn’t afford very much.
Daddy listened to NPR while I watched the road
out the window. Houston seemed like the end of
the world to me. The last place you would ever
want to live. It was hot and humid and the water
from the tap tasted like sand. The one thing I
liked about Daddy was that he kept the
air-conditioning at seventy-six. He said that
everyone he knew thought he was crazy, but he
didn’t care. He loved walking into his apartment
and saying, “Ahh!”
Some news about Iraq came on, and Daddy turned
up the volume. They had just invaded Kuwait.
“Fucking Saddam,” Daddy said, and I relaxed a
little that he would swear.
We went to a housing development called Charming
Gates and looked at the model home. A realtor
named Mrs. Van Dyke gave us the tour, which
ended in the kitchen, where she offered Daddy a
cup of coffee. She talked a lot about the beauty
of the home, its reasonable price, the school
district, and safety. Daddy tried to bargain
with her, and she said that wasn’t really done.
She said if he were buying an older home, that
sort of thing would be fine, but that new homes
had fixed prices. Back in the car, he made fun
of her southern accent, which sounded even
funnier with his own accent mixed in.
For dinner, we had thin-crust pizza at a place
called Panjo’s. Daddy said that it was his
favorite and that he ate there a lot. He said
the last time he’d been there, he’d come with a
woman from work, on a date. He said he’d liked
her quite a bit until she took out a cigarette.
Then he realized she was stupid. I thought she
was stupid, too, not because she smoked, but
because she’d gone on a date with Daddy.
That night, on the vinyl bed, I thought about my
future. I imagined it as day after day of
misery. I decided nothing good would ever happen
to me, and I began to fantasize about Barry. I
fantasized that he would come and rescue me from
my father, then we would move back to Syracuse,
only without telling my mother. We would live in
a house on the other side of town, and I could
wear whatever I wanted to the breakfast table.
In the morning, Barry hadn’t arrived yet. It was
just my father, standing in the doorway and
whistling like a bird. “I don’t really like
that,” I said, and he laughed and did it again.
That day, we went to see more model homes. And
more over the weekend. On Sunday night, Daddy
asked me which one I liked best, and I picked
the cheapest one, in Charming Gates. He said he
agreed, and a few weeks later we moved in. It
was a nice place with four bedrooms – one for
Daddy, one for me, one for an office, and one
for a guest room. Daddy and I each had our own
bathroom. The name of my wallpaper was “adobe,”
since it looked like all these little earthen
houses, and my sink and countertop were cream
with gold glitter trapped underneath. It was my
responsibility to keep my bathroom clean, and
Daddy bought me a can of Comet for under the
sink.
Daddy’s bathroom was twice the size of mine. It
connected to his room and had two sinks, plus a
walk-in closet with one rack on top of the
other, just like at the dry cleaner’s. Some of
his suits were even in dry-cleaner bags. His
toilet was in a little room with its own
separate door, and right away, after we moved
in, it started to smell like pee. He didn’t have
a bathtub like I did, but he had a shower stall
with a door that made a loud click when you shut
it.
There were formal and informal living rooms, as
well as a formal dining room and a breakfast
nook. We started using everything for what it
was named for. Breakfast in the breakfast nook,
dinner in the dining room, TV in the informal
living room (which also had the fireplace), and
guests in the formal living room at the front of
the house.
Our first guests were the next-door neighbors,
Mr. and Mrs. Vuoso and their ten-year-old son,
Zack. They came over with a pie Mrs. Vuoso had
baked. Daddy invited them to sit down on his
brown velvet couch, then brought them all hot
tea, even though they hadn’t asked for it. “Oh
my,” Mrs. Vuoso said, “tea in a glass.”
“This is how we serve it in my country,” Daddy
said.
Mrs. Vuoso asked him what country that was, and
Daddy told her. “Imagine that,” she commented,
and Daddy nodded.
“You must have some interesting opinions on the
situation over there,” Mr. Vuoso said. He was a
very clean-looking man, with short, glossy brown
hair and a black T-shirt. He wore jeans that
looked ironed, and had very big arm muscles. The
biggest I’d ever seen. They got in the way of
his arms lying flat at his sides.
“I certainly do,” Daddy said.
“Maybe I’d like to hear them sometime,” Mr.
Vuoso said, only it sounded like he didn’t
really want to hear them at all.
“Not today,” Mrs. Vuoso warned. “No politics
today.” She wore a tan skirt and flat shoes. Her
face was young, but her short hair was totally
gray. I had to keep reminding myself that she
was Mr. Vuoso’s wife, and not his mother.
“Do you know how to play badminton?” Zack asked
me. He sat between his parents on the couch, his
legs sticking straight out in front of him. He
looked a little like his father, with short
brown hair and neat jeans.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Do you want to play now?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, even though I didn’t. I was more
interested in staying with the grown-ups. I kept
wondering if Mr. Vuoso was going to beat up
Daddy.
The Vuosos had a badminton net in their
backyard, and Zack kept hitting the birdie into
my boobs and laughing. “Cut it out,” I finally
told him.
“I’m just hitting it,” he said. “I can’t help
where it lands.”
I let him do it a few more times, then I quit.
“Want to do something else?” he asked.
“No thanks,” I said, walking to his side of the
net and handing him the racquet.
We went back to my house, where the Vuosos were
just getting ready to leave. “Who won?” Mr.
Vuoso asked.
“I did,” Zack said. “She quit.”
“We don’t say she when the person is right
beside us,” Mrs. Vuoso said.
“I don’t remember her name,” Zack said.
“Jasira,” Mr. Vuoso said. “Her name is Jasira.”
He smiled at me then, and I didn’t know what to
do.
After they left, Daddy told me that Mr. Vuoso
was a reservist, which meant he was in the army
on the weekends. “This guy is something else,”
Daddy said, shaking his head. “He thinks I love
Saddam. It’s an insult.”
“Did you tell him you don’t?” I asked.
“I told him nothing,” Daddy said. “Who is he to
me?”
There was a pool in Charming Gates, and Daddy
felt strongly that we should be using it. He
said he wasn’t paying all of this money just so
I could sit around in the air-conditioning. I
told him I didn’t want to go, but when he asked
me why, I was too embarrassed to say. It was my
pubic hair. There was getting to be more and
more of it, and some of it came out the legs of
my bathing suit. I’d begged my mother to teach
me how to shave, but she said no, that once you
started, there was no stopping. I cried about
this all the time, and my mother told me to can
it. I told her that the girls in gym class
called me Chewbacca, and she said she didn’t
know who that was. Barry said he knew who it was
and that it wasn’t very nice, but my mother told
him that since he didn’t have any kids of his
own, he could go ahead and butt out.
Then one night, when my mother had
parent/teacher conferences, Barry called me into
the bathroom. He was standing there in his
sweats and a T-shirt, holding a razor and a can
of shaving cream. “Put your bathing suit on,” he
said. “Let’s figure out how to do this.” So I
put my bathing suit on and stood in the tub, and
he shaved my pubic hair. “How’s that?” he asked
when he was finished, and I said it looked good.
When it came time to shave again, Barry asked if
I remembered how to do it, or if I needed him to
show me one more time. I told him I needed him
to show me, even though I did remember. It just
felt nice to stand there and have him do such a
dangerous and careful thing to me.
My mother would never have found out except that
after a while, the tub got clogged. She called
the plumber, and when he used his snake, all
that came up were my black curly hairs. “That
happens sometimes,” he said. “It ain’t always
the hair on your head.” Then he charged my
mother a hundred dollars to pour some
Liquid-Plumr down the drain.
“Take off your pants,” she said when he left,
and I did. There was no use fighting her.
“Did I tell you you could shave?” she asked.
“Did I?”
“No,” I said.
“Get me the razor,” she said, and I told her I
didn’t have one, that I’d snuck and used
Barry’s. When he came home, she made me
apologize to him for taking his property without
asking. “That’s okay,” he said, and my mother
grounded me for a month.
Then, a week later, Barry broke down and told
her the truth. That he had shaved me himself.
That he had been shaving me for weeks. That he
couldn’t seem to stop shaving me. He said the
whole thing was his fault, but my mother blamed
me. She said if I hadn’t always been talking
about my pubic hair, this would never have
happened. She said that when Barry had first
offered to shave me, I should’ve said no. She
said there were right and wrong ways to act
around men, and for me to learn which was which,
I should probably go and live with one.
Finally Daddy forced me to go swimming. I
figured he would probably like all my pubic
hair, since it made me look ugly. But then, when
we got to the pool and I took my shorts off, he
said, “This bathing suit doesn’t even cover
you.”
“Yes, it does,” I said, looking down at the
low-cut legs.
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “You’re falling out
of it. Put your shorts back on immediately.”
I put my shorts back on and sat on my towel,
watching Daddy swim laps back and forth in the
single lane that had been roped off for adults.
Once, a little kid got confused and drifted
under the lane divider, and Daddy had to stop in
midstroke.
Continues…
Excerpted from Towelhead
by Alicia Erian
Copyright © 2005 by Alicia Erian.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2005
Alicia Erian
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-4494-X
