Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Read online

  Praise for Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

  “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is sad, funny, juicy, and prickly with deep and secret thoughtful places. It is raucous and poignant at once and I recommend it highly.”

  —Mary Gaitskill, author of The Mare and Somebody with a Little Hammer

  “Harrowing and beautiful. What seems most miraculous about Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is the way T Kira Madden forges out of such achingly difficult material a memoir as frank and funny and powerful and surprising as this, her utterly gorgeous debut.”

  —Lauren Groff, author of Florida and Fates and Furies

  “With Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, T Kira Madden comes first to break your heart: make no mistake, this is a heartbreaking book. Even better, Madden has come to break your heart open: to crack your heart wide, to spill out the heart’s grief and pain so she can fill it back up with joy and beauty and love. Give in, give up, give yourself up to this book: it is on your side, on all our sides.”

  —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper

  “I’ve never read such a gorgeous and raw depiction of girlhood, the terrible vulnerability of adolescence, and the humiliation that often goes hand in hand with desire. Madden is fearless about diving deep into the darkest aspects of herself and her past, and that’s what makes her work riveting and urgent. An absolutely necessary book.”

  —Julie Buntin, author of Marlena

  “An intersectional memoir felt in the flesh, set in the sweltering, scandalous southernmost state at the height of its grunge and glamour. T Kira Madden is an acute observer of her family, her environment, and her own mind, and is generous despite—or perhaps because of—what she’s endured. Her bleeding, gorgeous prose will get under your skin and leave you aching in love. Her first book is a triumph.”

  —Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State

  “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls reminds us beautifully that we are unshielded, that we are blessed with life only by a narrow and undecipherable margin. This book has grit and a feisty elegance I love, and I love the mess and tenderness here of being and having been a girl.”

  —Noy Holland, author of I Was Trying to Describe What It Feels Like

  “This memoir is as hopeful as it is hard, as big-hearted as it is bold in its scrutiny of the unrelenting joys and terrors of being a girl. Madden’s prose will hypnotize you as it wrings every drop of beauty out of her story. If you’ve ever known the predicament of having a magical and messy family, a female body, or the mixed blessing of a big heart and a keen mind in a troubled world, then you need this book as much as I did.”

  —Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me

  “What are the ties that bind us, the events that shape us? In this beautiful memoir T Kira Madden confronts these questions, unflinchingly, with breathtaking honesty. Reminiscent of The Glass Castle, her unique vision and voice take us into the depths of her astonishing experience. Yet what is most startling is that she writes sentences that I feel I’ve never read before. I don’t think anyone has.”

  —Mary Morris, author of The Jazz Palace and Gateway to the Moon

  “T Kira Madden’s exquisitely crafted memoir—compassionate and tender, yet mercilessly direct—draws you into a tribe where grief is bigger than the body and growing up is something that happens to you your entire life. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is a wrenching story of longing, loss, and extraordinary coincidence—a debut act of courage and ferocious beauty from a formidable new talent.”

  —Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

  “Madden perfectly captures the ache of a child trying to find her place. You may not be a competitive equestrian, a Floridian, or the mixed-race child of two parents who struggle with addiction; you may have never fallen in love with another woman; but everyone who has ever longed for more love will understand.”

  —Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You

  “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is a triumph. It’s for anyone reading late into the night wondering, will I survive this? T Kira Madden tells us, as only she can, that the answer is yes. It’s a journey through the dark heart of family love and the cosmic mystery of queer youth and you don’t want to miss it. This book reminded me how books can save.”

  —Genevieve Hudson, author of A Little in Love with Everyone

  “Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is a spell that turns Madden into the best friend our former selves needed so badly. A friend who shows us ourselves with tenderness. This book is a dark powerhouse of yearning and reckoning that reminds us all of the girl we’ve spent our lives trying to grow out of—and all the ways we punish her for sticking around.”

  —Tatiana Ryckman, author of I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do)

  “Madden’s language shimmers and scorches as she crafts this brilliantly frank portrait of girlhood that is also a love letter to a mother, a eulogy for a father. I loved this book for its big-hearted, aching renderings of sexuality, addiction, and family, for its exquisite attentiveness, and in the end for its hope that a family can grow to embrace all it’s been and might become.”

  —Kristin Dombek, author of The Selfishness of Others

  “Stunningly crafted and a true page-turner, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls thrums with power, beauty, and truth, the makings of a modern classic. In T Kira Madden’s hands, love’s light refracts. The result is a vivid portrait of queer awakening set against the devastating backdrop of addiction, loss, and, ultimately, triumphant reclamation. I finished this book blinded by tears and a deep appreciation for Madden’s undeniable talent. She is a force to be braced for, and heralded.”

  —Allie Rowbottom, author of JELL-O Girls

  for my mother and father

  CONTENTS

  A Note from the Author

  Preface

  PART I. THE FEELS OF LOVE

  Uncle Nuke

  Pencil

  Why You Like It

  Even the Dogs

  Just One Look Is Worth a Thousand Words

  Womanly Things

  Show Name

  Cry Baby

  Bugs

  The Lizard

  Chicken & Stars

  Rewired

  The Feels of Love

  PART II. THE GREETER

  Cousin Cindy

  Can I Pet Your Back?

  Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

  How to Survive in Boca Raton

  The Greeter

  People Like Them

  Brothers

  Big Hair, Big Hearts

  I’m Still Here

  Another Word for Creep

  Footnote

  Collected Dates with My Father

  PART III. TELL THE WOMEN I’M LONELY

  Kuleana

  Acknowledgments

  You remember too much,

  my mother said to me recently.

  Why hold onto all that? And I said,

  Where can I put it down?

  —Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  While the material in this book comprises extensive research, interview content, photographs, and journals, much of it is based on memory, which is discrete, impressionable, and shaped by the body inside of which it lives.

  PREFACE

  For instance: the women. From the television commercial that’s been looping for as long as I can remember, featuring the first song I ever memorized. In the commercial, white women in lime-green bikinis walk barefoot and elegant across the smooth deck of a yacht. Their steps have bounce to them; their thongs are amazing. The
women flip their hair at the sun, and beads of seawater drip onto their shoulders, down the creases between their breasts. The droplets roll and glitter over their bodies like mercury from a smashed thermometer. A man sings: “Naturally you’re lookin’ good, you look just like you dreamed you would! You’re having fun, you’re at your best, and all it took was Just One Look! Florida Center for Cosmetic Surgery: just one look is worth a thousand words!” His girls are so pleased to be beautiful, his.

  When I grow up, after I leave this town, I tuck in alone at night, listen to the garbage trucks lift and crash their arms through the New York freeze. I sip lukewarm water from a clay mug on my nightstand. Three A.M.—bewitched. Just last week, I had a father. He used to say, Sleep, child, need that beauty sleep. No child of mine could be so afraid of sleep. He called me pretty then. Now he is dust—some teeth—a copper urn on my bookshelf, polished.

  My hands—they are never not shaking. I press them under my body. Breathe into my pillow until the world goes vague. When I drift off, it’s the women who come first. It’s the women wearing their happiness in a film of sweat, the honor of their position. And then it’s me, a child. A girl pressing her hands against a television screen. She feels the women thrill through the static. She doesn’t move. She stays like this until she hears him again, that little man on his boat, always there, still singing.

  PART I

  THE FEELS OF LOVE

  UNCLE NUKE

  My mother rescued a mannequin from the J. C. Penney dump when I was two years old. He was a full-bodied jewelry mannequin: fancy, distinguished. Those were the words she used. Her father, my grandfather, worked the counter day and night, slinked antique chains and strands of jade across velvet placemats, and felt the mannequin did no work for his numbers; he’s pau—done. Grandfather said this with both elbows bent, a chopping motion. The mannequin would have to go.

  In this part of the story, my mother and I live alone in Coconut Grove, Florida. We’re in a canary-yellow apartment damned with beanbag ashtrays, field mice, the guts of flashlights and remote controls (Where have all the batteries gone? Where do they go?), and a shag carpet that feels sharp all the way under the shag. She’s single, my mother, the crimson-mouthed mistress of my father, a white man, who is back home in downtown Miami with his artist wife, his two handsome boys. Soon, my father will move my mother and me into a porn director’s apartment, and then to Boca Raton—the Rat’s Mouth—to start over, but none of us knows this yet.

  My mother, a Chinese, Hawaiian, pocketknife of a woman, shot a man once. She tells me this story all the time. How the strange man tried to crawl through her window, naked, choking out his cock as she slipped into a nightgown. She shot him in the shoulder with a boyfriend’s .357 Magnum, his body spat out like a rag doll into the liquid black night. He landed in the street—too far to be trespassing—so she dragged him by the legs back on her lawn for more. The man was paralyzed for the rest of his life; he threatened to sue. My mother never once regretted this incident.

  But this is how it was in Coconut Grove in the 1980s and early ’90s. Bandits, robbers, glass stems on the sidewalk, bad men doing bad under the bridge. My mother had little to defend in that first apartment of ours—a few gems from her father, frosted Christmas ornaments, her Chinese jade, some cash—but then there was me. We needed a man in our home, a figure bigger than us, she said, to scare off all the other men who would come. All of this to say that the reason she rescued that mannequin, the reason she wrapped her arms wickedly tight around his waist, carrying him to the backseat of our Volvo where the top half of his body slung out the window, his bald head pat-pattering under the rain on our car ride home, all the reasons she did anything—the wrong things, the strange things, the dangerous, the sublime—the reasons she does any of it, still, is to protect me. Remember this.

  I name him Uncle Nuke. He has marble eyes, real hair feathering out from his lash line, eyebrows painted with delicate streaks, thin as needles, curved. Little nail moons. He stands six feet tall and smells clean and metallic as the air before a Florida storm. Uncle Nuke wears a tuxedo, and under his clothes, my mother is learning to take advantage of his joints. With a simple twist-pop, she detaches his torso, places him in the passenger seat of our car, buckling him gently like another child. I like staring at the dome of his bald head from the backseat. It’s chipped in places—silver, flecked. We’re able to drive in the HOV lane with the extra body. Three makes a family, says my mother. At least that.

  My father visits our apartment sometimes, at night, so late that my visions of him are smudged. There’s the smell of him: Merit cigarettes, orange juice and vodka, money. The grind of his voice. The word: father. This here is your father and Hello, I’m your father. He slips up often and calls me Son. Mostly, when I conjure him then and remember him now, I think of gold. Gold horse bits on the buckles of his shoes; gold buttons on sailor jackets; a gold pinky ring; the gold chain necklace my grandfather gave him from the fanciest case at J. C. Penney. A trade, he said, for my father to wise up and make a commitment—a Jew chain for the only Jewish man I’ve ever met—to turn my mother into something honorable.

  Before my father arrives at our apartment, my mother sits Uncle Nuke in a rocking chair near the front window. My mother likes him like this, in profile, the edges of his regal face chiseled out like a dream. Sometimes his legs lie in the corner of our living room, the trousers pressed, his knees locked into place. My mother and I like to change his socks at least once a week. We pull the bright patterns over his club feet, delicately roll the bands up his calves.

  This man doesn’t look like he belongs in our home. He looks like he belongs to a different era, someplace far away from here, a life with white dinner gloves, niceties, an engraved cigarette case—U.N.—that quietly clicks closed. My father knows all about the mannequin, his practical functions, the way he wards off intruders, but I wonder, still, what his shadow did to my father’s heart when he drove up in his white Cadillac—if it stoked something fierce enough inside him to make his temples quake, to whet his desire for my mother and me; if it was Uncle Nuke, not even a real man, who eventually made him unpack and stay.

  When my father moves in, I begin crawling out of my bedroom at night to visit Uncle Nuke. We meet at his rocking chair. I coil up at his feet.

  Where did you come from? I ask. I grip behind the joints of his ankles, breathing in. I’m the one who loves you now.

  I press my cheek into the patent leather of his shoes. My mother has my father and I have Uncle Nuke. In the morning, I wear the red indents of his shoelaces across my face like a map.

  I can’t bear the thought of leaving Uncle Nuke. Not for school, or for walks to Biscayne Bay; I don’t even like to leave whichever room he’s in. I, too, learn to work his joints. Before school, I twist off one of his hands, hiding it in my lunch box. I hold the hand as much as I can throughout my day, a horseshoe grip around the bulk of fingers.

  What’s wrong with the kid? I’ve heard my father ask. She doesn’t get her weird from me.

  She likes to hold him is all, says my mother. You know kids—you have two others. They like to hold on to things, don’t they?

  Here is a memory that still comes to me: I am small, too small, thimble legs in a yellow dress. My parents are getting married tonight. There are steep steps in the lobby of the Omni Hotel, and I am expected to walk down these steps with grace, to flick flowers. My mother wears a Chinese wedding gown, a beaded headpiece like a bird of paradise. She says, You can do this. She smiles the biggest smile of her life. My grandfather is wearing his best cuff links, veiny green jade, proud at last. He walks me through the steps I will take, Count. You can count, right? Everyone will love you.

  They do. I make my way down the stairs with Ohs and Ahs of delight, the pop of flashbulbs. The bastard child.

  My parents seem very much in love. I am old enough to know that. They dance little steps, around in a square. They smear cake and lick it. My father’s lips part as he s
queezes my mother by her waist, their slow song tickling the water in my glass, and I am jealous of the both of them.

  At home, in the half-dark, I tell Uncle Nuke all about it.

  I say, I guess we can keep him. If we have to.

  PENCIL

  A diary entry, age nine: If I were a pencil sharpener, I would be miserable and lonely. I would be a small blue pencil sharpener. My only friend would be the scissors, which are black. Sometimes, people put a yellow stick in my mouth and I have to bite until it gets sharp.

  WHY YOU LIKE IT

  I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive. What I wanted was my freckled cheeks printed on cheap paper, stapled at the ears, the flyers torn from telephone poles and the scales of palm trees, a sliver of my face left flapping in the wind. I wanted to be the diametric opposite of who I was; am. To get gone. I wanted limbs dangling from the lip of a trash compactor, found by a lone jogger who would cry at the sight of my ankles, my beaten blue knees with their warm fuzz of kiddie hair.

  Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don’t show up dead. So long as they stay missing.

  I am nine years old in 1997, and I read magazines. I clip out so many images and faces that the remaining paper looks skeletal, like the threads of a crumbling leaf. My favorite magazine is called TigerBeat, with lips so glossed on the cover the paper looks wet. The clippings line the perimeter of my room, scotch-taped around the edges, gleaming.

  The magazines have girl parts inside and boys with shining chests and words that tell me how I should or should not act, how to make lifelong friends. This is how to make him wait; this is how to get crushed; this is how to line your panties.

  Are you lonely?

  Sure, I’m lonely, I write to myself, on the electric IBM Wheelwriter my Grandma Yukling gave to me. Grandma goes by Rose now, because her American co-workers at the bank told her it was easier to say. Rosebud—more memorable—they saw it in a movie once, and so she used it.