My head is currently swimming with questions and sadness, and I don't want that to spill over this blog just yet. Instead, I am posting a story I wrote for a creative writing class that I just finished at UCLA. The assignment was to find a picture of a person we did not know and write a story about that image.
This is the photo I used:
The story I wrote is below, though the girl in my story is not the woman in the photo but someone finding her own two feet.
After Daddy died, Mama moved us three kids from Alabama to Minnesota so we could live with her Ma and Pa. We left our white house on Willow Tree Drive on a Friday morning and pulled in the driveway of Ma and Pa Regan’s on my 16th birthday, four days later.
Mama didn’t waste no time getting me and my sister in school. Sandra and I both started at Rawlings High, the same place where Mama went, just a day after getting to town. Little Tommy went to a grammar school across town.
I thought moving would be a good chance to change my name. All my life Mama and Sandra and everybody else called me Geraldine. I just hated it. So I thought I’d go by Gi-Gi instead. The name didn’t take at home, but the teachers didn’t know that.
There was a lot different about Minnesota. Sure we had winters in Alabama, but they were nothing like the miserable winters that come north. And the kids in the North ain’t at all like the kids in the South. They dressed a little better up there, and they all talked like they read dictionaries before bed every night. They hardly ever said please, and they weren’t polite about gossiping. In Mobile we’d at least wait until you were around the corner before starting in on the name-calling. My first few days at Rawlings, I caught hell because of the way I talked. Then the kids started in on me about my clothes. After that I stopped paying any mind, and I ate my lunch in the library.
It was like that for about four months, I guess, when one day a girl in my Biology class asked me if I wanted to sit with her at lunch. I thought, “My stars!” and tried not to grin like that Cheshire Cat. The girl’s name was Judith, and she had a strange way of talking too. I sorta frowned when she told me she was from Maine because that meant she was a Yankee, but I was so happy to have someone to talk to, I was willin’ to overlook that.
Judith and her friends smoked, colored their hair, and kissed boys in the janitor’s closet. Smoking wasn’t so bad once you got used to the sweet tobacco scratching at the back of your throat. And I’d always wanted to be blonde like Marilyn Monroe. Try as I may, though, I always felt like I was tagging along. Boys didn’t take a shine to me like they did to the other girls, and I only smoked at school. Mama woulda smacked the fire out of me if she caught me smoking in the house. So I wore more eyeliner than any other girl, and I kept quiet.
One afternoon, Judith talked a couple of us girls into cutting class. We went to Conrad Department Store to try on fancy hats and gloves. Usually bracelets and rings were behind a glass case, but that day there was a tray of sparkly stuff sitting out on the counter. I saw the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—a ring with a pearl sitting right on top. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth pearl and watched how it disappeared under my palm.
I could hear Judith hoopin’ and hollerin’ over near the belts, so I went to join her. It was about that time that a man pressed his claw of a hand into my shoulder and boomed out, “Young lady, just what do you think you’re doing?”
Judith and the others stared at me wide-eyed and pale for a split-second before running off.
At the police station I had my fingers smashed in ink and my picture taken twice—one looking in the direction of a secretary typing away at a little desk and another looking right at the camera. The police didn’t really talk to me, just at me. A detective named Mr. Falls told Mama that I was probably doing it for attention—what with the move from Alabama and Daddy’s passing, but that weren’t true.
For once, I just wanted to keep a little something beautiful for myself.
