It’s 1984. We are the nine-year-old daughters of Manana. Our fathers are all Marines. Some of our mothers stay home and pluck their eyebrows. Some of them are Girl Scout leaders or substitute teachers. Some of our mothers are also Marines. The Marine mothers teach swimming lessons and like foot massages. They give us lists of impossible chores and force us to perm our hair. When we get tired of chores and perms we lace up our roller skates. Our feet are lead but we have super-strong thigh muscles so we move fast and take to the hills with a roar. There are so many of us, the nine-year-old girls of Manana. When we lace our skates and roar we gather more, and more, and more; all the girls burst out the doors of their matching military housing, all the girls with their jelly bracelets and their green junior uniforms and their perms. When we get tired of skates we take to the dirt. We run red-stained and barefoot over car-flattened frogs and silky packed mud and sticky grass and burrs. The bottoms of our feet grow thick with sunlight and asphalt. We stand on each other’s shoulders and hang upside down from rusty bars. When we get tired of running we take to the trees. We climb into thrones of leaf and blossom. The sap webs our fingers and makes us into animals. Our mothers will never be able to scrub it off and we will hide it from our fathers. When we get tired of the trees we fly down the hill and take to the water with our sap-webbed hands. We grow gills to meet all the tricks we need for the deep end, like handstands and head-over-heels under water. We never need to breathe air. We meet at the bottom. Our skin turns green and our hair stands on end. We plant our feet and hold hands and call the storm.
Angela’s father beats her brother with a belt in the front yard so that everyone can see.
Doreen has no sheets on her bed.
Stephanie’s mother pretends she can’t hear Stephanie’s father.
Carla’s father drowned the kittens and lied to her.
Leilani grew her hair past her butt and became a babysitter.
Tanya’s mother smokes cigarettes and talks on the phone while she holds the baby.
Staci tried out her mother’s painkillers and didn’t tell anyone.
Claire went into the banyan tree with a bunch of boys.
We plant ourselves the bottom of the pool in the middle of the thunderstorm, a perfect square churning. There’s wind inside the water and it stirs all around our hair and our faces and our shoulders. We can’t imagine why the mothers always warned against swimming, and the deep end, and thunder. What was the purpose of the warning? Did you know that electricity holds a deep, cold, blue glow? Did you ever see lightning strike underwater? Did you know that a girl can be suspended in the shell of a heartbeat, in a capsule of time, in restlessness, in foolishness, in wonder? Did you know that a mermaid can conjure a tidal wave in a swimming pool? You might not make it out fast enough but you better run.
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