((Dear, Guy. It's me, Della)) Wonder

Dear Unknown,

It took me a long time to think about what I was going to call you. Sir or Madam felt too formal for words, like I was writing a letter to the principal or the government or something. I just knew that if I glanced back up to the header I would picture standing in front of a row of old men in suits explaining my problems and get nervous about what I want to say. But I couldn’t say ‘Hey, Man,’ or ‘Hows it going, Buddy’ the way that my daddy and his rough neck friends do to each other. I found out from a friend of a friend that around town they call you a ‘Wise Man’- and maybe you like that, but they call me ‘Brains’ and ‘Smart girl’ and it doesn’t stop me from having problems the same as everyone else.

Perhaps, you don’t mind what I call you. For a few seconds, I was going to call you ‘Mom’- and when I got a reply, if anyone ever does reply, I could imagine that it was her giving me advice. I could close my eyes and think up her voice, her hand in my hair- pretending like I remember her smell. But I’m sure I would have always known, deep down that it wasn’t. I’m good at lying to everyone except myself. So for now, I guess you’ll just have to be unknown- and you have no idea how rare a word that is for me to use.

I’m writing this when I should be listening in class. Our teacher is up at the front, explaining Pythagorean theorem and I’m watching her lips get tighter and tighter together as the class drifts away from consciousness one by one. Nobody needs to explain Pythagoras to me- I was drawing tetractys on the back of napkins at dinner when the kids in my class were depicting their momma’s and daddys in crayon up the skirting boards. Usually by the time they get around to teaching something at school, I already know about it. Mostly, I look around the class at other people when I’m supposed to be studying, though I like to think that I’m still doing math- there’s someone in front of me (I’m afraid to use her real name, as though you’re her or something, which is probably utterly impossible) and she’s so perfect that I’m sure the golden ratio applies to the curve of her hip, give me a protractor and I would happily measure the angle her nipple lies at when you look at her side on…actually perhaps I’m glad I decided not to think of you as my mom.

Do girls talk like this with their mother’s, about sex and attraction and all of the messy things that springs from simply having a set of genitals and being alive? I have more than a few friends who still have their mother’s around and I’ve always been jealous of how close some of them are, how much they can share. Even when they are crying, even when it’s all gone wrong their momma’s are always there for them…and they always seem to know exactly what to say. I don’t know if you’d know…everyone says you are a man, but then you’d probably know as much as I do since my momma died when I was a few days old. What I do know though, is that I can not talk about things like this with my daddy. And this is the reason why I’m writing to you now. Because of what happened yesterday.

To really understand what happened, I have to tell you about three people (and one plant) first; a man, a cactus, a boy and a girl. The man is my daddy and just about the greatest guy I know. He drinks his scotch from a mug, fills it right up to the top with ice and sits with it melting on the porch in the summer, playing his guitar all night until he’s got nothing to drink but water that’s about ten percent scotch flavoured- if that. When I was in born he was in a detention centre for assaulting my momma’s husband- but you tell anyone that knows him that and they never believe you, I barely believe him sometimes since he won’t talk about it and I can’t picture him assaulting anyone. I’ve seen him scoop spiders off the window sill and carry them outside. But no, I ask him about anything to do with being arrested and he closes off- something I guess we have in common.

We live right at the edge of the oil fields, as though we’re standing at the edge of an ink black ocean. There’s nothing but scrub growing on the desiccated earth and the wind kicks up the dirt a lot- our house came with a few plants but they aren’t doing so well; they seem to flower a sickly pale colour for one week in the spring and are crisp and brown for the rest of the year (we’d have taken them up if it wasn’t for that one week in spring, it’s like they are whispering in the smallest of voices that they are still alive and hope’s a bit like that aint it?).Which brings me to the cactus I mentioned earlier-the only thing that’s thriving in our backyard; six foot two, I kid you not, and an acid green colour. Daddy and me call him Rex Splosion- get it?- because of the first time I made a firework in the garden and he got singed. Sometimes we talk to Rex Splosion at dinner (okay that sounds a little weird, but my daddy and me are nothing if not a little eccentric; I’m allowed it, being a genius and all- he has no excuse though I’m afraid) usually when we’re mad at each other and trying not to talk to each other.

“Rex, would you tell Della that she owes me a dollar fifty for the pan she burned a hole right through when she was messin’ around with her science fiddlin’s again?” or “Rex, would you ask Daddy just when he intends to get off my back about that meeting with the school when I explained everything to him.” Normally it’s so ridiculous to us that after a while we forget to be mad. That cactus has gotten us out of a lot of fights.

I only mention Rex Splosion because yesterday we’d finished dinner; daddy was washing up because I’d cooked, up to the forearms in soapy water when he turned to the window- out where Rex sits in our yard, looking out onto the black ocean of the oil fields and said in a weirdly choked voice that for all my intelligence I couldn’t actually work out,“Rex, can you ask Della if she plans to hang out with that neighbour boy again tonight.”

That boy is Rafi and I know less about him than my daddy or even my cactus…just that I’ve been tutoring him for a little while, since he needs help with school even though he’s two years older than me. He’s tall and looks like any other kid you find waiting to be shipped out to the oil fields- but he has sad eyes and dreams of better things that he won’t tell me about…I blew up a tree (just…don’t ask) and we got to talking and I like him a lot. Just not as much as I’m supposed to- you’ll see what I mean.

“I don’t think so,” I said, knees pulled up to my chest on the dining chair as I read my book. “Tomorrow though maybe. If he wants me.” I meant if he wanted me to help with his homework, but my daddy took it another way, judging from the way he kept cleaning the same spot on a dinner plate over and over again.

“He’s…He’s a little older than I’d hoped for kiddo,” Daddy said suddenly, heavily. “But…I suppose I can’t talk, considering how much older your momma was than me.” The plates were put down into the soapy water as he sat heavily down in the chair. Resting his elbows on the table, head lowered as though in prayer I could see the bald patch forming in his hair, shining a little with sweat, sort of like a pool in messy scrubland or something.

“Rex, could you ask Dad why…”

“We gotta talk seriously for a minute, Dell.” He interrupted me quickly. “You’re…” Daddy looked like he was swallowing glass, “You’re a womannow Della and…you’re…smart and pretty so it’s not surprising that there’s a boy who wants to get to know you and be your boyfriend….” He said get to know you as though it were a swearword and I realised what he was driving at.

You know about the man, the cactus and the boy- so you probably aren’t surprised that the girl is me. Della. I was going to give you a false name- but that was before I’d written in what my daddy said without realising it! I’m sixteen years old and everyone says I’m a genius- but really, I just look for problems and do my best to fix them….sort of the way that you do, only with me it’s with mathematics, science and engineering as opposed to talking and feelings. One day I want to work on an oil rigs learning mechanics, and Rafi is not my boyfriend.

Because I like girls. I'm gay. I'm a dyke and a rug muncher and in this day and age nobody cares and I can get girls whenever I like- wherever I like, go back to theirs and screw them silly and not call them the next day. Ask me out on the street and I’ll yell it and I wont care who’s listening because it’s irrelevant where I stick my fingers and totally relevant too because I’m sixteen, slap bang in the middle of puberty with estradiol, testosterone and leptin coursing through my body and it’s all I think about most of the time, but…for some reason I can’t tell my Daddy. Looking over at him, chewing on glass, wincing as he imagined me having sex with an eighteen year old neighbour boy with a thick neck destined for the same life on the oil fields he had done- it was obvious that my daddy was really trying. Really trying not to weird me out, but feeling as though I had to have the talk- even though I’ve known about biology and sex for years and it was obvious neither of us wanted to. He wouldn’t be angry if I told him. Maybe a little hurt…

And I should have told him. But what did I do? Shook my head, “I…we know all of that.” Not lying and saying that I was with Rafi but definitely not telling him the truth either. Just thinking about it now makes me feel sick with the shame of it.

I know what I have to do. That’s not why I’m writing.

Sometimes I feel like she’d know exactly what to say, and she’d just listen to me. I guess…at the end of it all, it isn’t about a man, a cactus, a boy and a girl. It’s just about my mother. Who never baked cakes on my birthday, brushed my hair like mothers do for their daughters or told me what to do when I started my monthly bleeding. No one knows it, but I’ve cried over girls before, I’ve cried over dumb things too like getting pushed into a locker one time, losing my pencil case but I would have let her know it. And she’d have whispered to me in a voice that I remember, she’d have held me close, her scent filling up my nose and just…let me cry.

You’re not supposed to miss what you never had, isn’t that what they say? But I’m near the end of the letter now and I realised that I changed my mind, I really do wish I was writing a letter to my mother. But deep down I know I’m not.

Yours, Della.