Terri Linn Davis
Here is 1998. You enter it wearing a white training bra and platform heels, red and glossy like fresh blood. It doesn’t matter who the president is or what wars aren’t happening, it matters that people call you a tomboy and that you feel like one, too.
You obsess over the Spice Girls. You are the president of their fan club. The meetings are held weekly in your bedroom, but no one takes you seriously even though you have a gavel and a written agenda. Your friends make you be Sporty Spice when you play because of your plain brown hair color and probably because you still climb trees and capture snakes and spider egg sacs. You relent, but you want so badly to be a Baby Spice. Posh Spice is too far of a reach, even for your own imagination.
You’ve been raised by your hands-off blue collar dad for the last 2 plus years. Forget about him. Mom is back now from where she was. She’s a tomboy, too. She cusses and she carries heavy furniture with a lit cigarette in her mouth, but she curls her bangs and knows how to wear makeup when she goes out at night.
She lets you and your friends go through her clothes and lingerie. When they sleep over she lets you all wear them and dance around. When you all play Spice Girls, your mom turns the music really loud, and you can be whoever you want to be because your mom screams, “Whoo! That’s my BABY!”
Men oogle your mom. When she takes you to the convenience store called Friendly Farms, you tell the man staring at her that she is 31. They both laugh and she rubs your head. You say it to protect her, you don’t know if that makes her less desirable, but you figure you have to try.
When your mom takes you to the place she calls the mall with the wigs in the window and the bruised fruit, you wear the red platforms. You stand next to her at the checkout lane and when you look up, an old man is standing there. You smile big at him because that is what they want you to do. He hugs you and kisses your head and tells you you’re a good girl. Your mom wraps a possessive arm around your shoulder and whispers, “Do you know him?.” You shake your head no and you both say nothing.
When you and your mom are baking cookies in the kitchen, she stops what she’s doing to teach you how to break someone’s elbow. She doesn’t have to say whose elbow. That it will be a man’s is always implied. “Look. This is how you break an elbow, baby.” She takes your arm and twists it, so it locks. She mimics a violent upward thrust from her knee onto your overextended elbow. “And you snap that motherfucker! Do it on me now.” And you do it on her, and you ask her to show it to you again and again. You snap men’s elbows until the cookies are done baking.
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Terri Linn Davis is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Icebreakers Lit, a journal featuring collaborative writing and the host of the podcast Too Lit To Quit: The Podcast for Literary Writers. You can find some of her work in Taco Bell Quarterly, Rejection Letters, and Five South. Terri lives in a 189-year-old haunted farmhouse in Connecticut with her co-habby and their three children. If you’re looking, you can find her on Twitter @TerriLinnDavis and on her website www.terrilinndavis.com