All the Beautiful Girls: An uplifting story of freedom, love and identity

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Aunt Tate said, “HOW COULD YOU?” and roughly flipped Lily over on her bed where she ’d been reading the Aviator’s latest gift, Beautiful Joe. Aunt Tate held Lily by the arm and struck her with the gut-flecked flyswatter. “That was my mother’s pitcher! My mother’s! You!”—whack—“ungrateful”—whack—“child!” Whack. “After all I’ve done for you!” Whack whack whack!

Lily had no idea what Aunt Tate was talking about. “I didn’t do anything!” Lily protested. “Aunt Tate, I didn’t do anything!”

“Don’t add the sin of lying.” Aunt Tate let go of Lily’s arm and gave Lily’s backside one more good whack. “No supper. Why I took you in is beyond me.” Aunt Tate slammed, opened, slammed the door several times. Bang!

Lily stayed still, as if she were playing freeze tag at school. She sucked in her cheeks and bit down, wondering if she could bite hard enough to tear out the sides of her mouth, chew and swallow the flesh. Her body burned in all the places where the flyswatter had landed. Lily remained there, perfectly still, breathing scant breaths. She fought back tears, ever mindful of her vow to keep control.

Later, when it was nearly dark and Lily was wondering if it might be safe to go pee, Aunt Tate came and stood beside Lily’s bed. “Uncle Miles told me.”

What? Lily panicked. What exactly had Uncle Miles said?

“He knocked the pitcher off of the mantel when he was looking for his matches. He told me you didn’t do it.”

Lily didn’t understand why Aunt Tate automatically believed such awful things about her. What was it about her that led Aunt Tate to assume the worst about Lily? Lily had never been a liar. Why didn’t Aunt Tate believe her?

Aunt Tate crossed her arms and held them against her middle as if she were suddenly cold, or maybe trying to hold something in or even protect herself; as if Lily might stand up and try to punch her in the stomach like they did sometimes on Roy Rogers when there was a fight in a saloon and cowboys smashed each other over the head with wooden chairs.

“I made a mistake,” Aunt Tate confessed. “I jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

Lily thought about the Aviator’s Beautiful Joe and how Joe ’s cruel master cut off his ears and hurt him even though Joe was a kind and loyal dog. A good dog. Then Joe got rescued and lived in a good home where people loved and understood him. Beautiful Joe’s life was the opposite of Lily’s. But why? What was wrong with her? What had she done? What could she do differently so that Aunt Tate wouldn’t call her “The cross I have to bear”?

“Aunt Tate?” Lily dared.

Her aunt tightened her arms about her middle. “What is it?” she said, not unkindly.

“Why can’t you love me?”

“Honey.” Aunt Tate took a step toward Lily but stopped herself. “It’s because I love you that I’m hard on you. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t bother.”

Even though Aunt Tate had half-buried “love” in that brief statement, she had at least admitted it. Still, it didn’t feel like love to Lily. There were no soft, rounded edges to Aunt Tate’s love. It was uneasy, all spiky and fearful, like the sea urchin Tom Bradstone had brought back from his vacation in California.

“I know I’m not very patient with you.” Aunt Tate sighed. “To be honest, Lily, I don’t have much experience with children. Just watching over your mother when she was a young brat.” Aunt Tate nearly smiled. “But now come have a sandwich, and then we ’ll get you ready for bed.” She extended a conciliatory hand.

“Can I have tuna fish?”

“You may have grilled cheese.”

“Oh, with Velveeta.” Lily sighed with pleasure. Her aunt’s hand in hers was neither warm nor cold. It was like dry newspaper, and Lily almost thought she could hear her aunt’s skin crinkle when she squeezed it.

That night, Lily dreamed that she was sitting at the top of the playground slide, looking down the length of it. The polished metal chute went on for miles—down, down, and down to an abrupt end where children dropped off into some kind of a crack in the earth. Someone was behind her, prodding her to release her handhold and let gravity take her. She felt the insistent push of a hand. Tap. Tap. TAP!

Lily awoke to the deepest part of the night. Half asleep, she swatted at something wet that was touching her under her bunched-up nightie.

Uncle Miles clenched her wrist like a slave’s clevis and held it immobile until he finished. After he was gone, Lily fed her pillowcase into her mouth, bit down, and swallowed her cries so that they filled her stomach like sharp gravel.

WHEN SHE CAME home from school the next day, there was an entire box of cherry suckers on the nightstand beside her bed. The kind with the looped rope handles she liked best.

“Go ahead and have one,” Aunt Tate said from the doorway. “But just one, or you’ll spoil your supper.”

Lily stalled, looking uncertainly at her aunt. A part of her was afraid the candy was from Uncle Miles.

“Adults make mistakes, too,” Aunt Tate said. “I made a mistake yesterday, when I blamed you. I’m sorry for that.”

“It’s okay,” Lily said because she could see how badly Aunt Tate needed to hear it.

“And, I’ve made your favorite chicken and dumplings for dinner. Wash up and then come help me with the snap beans. It’s about time I taught you to cook.”

While Lily sat on the kitchen stool and broke the crisp beans into pieces in a big white mixing bowl, Aunt Tate told Lily stories from when Mama and Aunt Tate were girls. She even showed Lily a little sickle-shaped scar on the back of her left hand where Mama had used a willow whip to attack her big sister. “We didn’t always get along,” Aunt Tate said. “But I always loved your mama. I just want for you to remember that she was a real person, with real faults. We always put the dead on a pedestal, but they were real humans, just like us. They made mistakes, just like us.”

Lily had just finished setting the table when Uncle Miles came through the kitchen door carrying a teeny-tiny guitar under his arm. Lily couldn’t help but hope it was a gift for her, a reward for keeping their secret.

“Oh no! You didn’t!” Aunt Tate said, laughing. “Oh, this is just plain funny!”

Lily had never before seen her aunt get the giggles. Aunt Tate used the hem of her apron to wipe the tears from the corners of her eyes. “You don’t have a musical bone in your body, old man. What on earth possessed you?” To Lily, she said, “Don’t forget the bread.”

Lily opened the bread box and stacked six slices of Wonder Bread on a plate. She twirled the plastic bag closed and used Aunt Tate’s wooden clothespin to reseal it. From the corner of her eye, she watched as Uncle Miles set the child-sized guitar on the chair next to the prayer shawl Aunt Tate was knitting. He rolled up his sleeves before washing his hands.

“Got it at Pawn City,” he said, lathering his hands. “Dirt cheap.” He was clearly more than a little pleased with himself.

“It shoulda been free,” Aunt Tate said, carefully ladling the chicken and dumplings into a deep white tureen. “No one in their right mind would buy that. A ukulele, Miles?”

“This is a ukulele?” Lily asked, gingerly plucking a string on the instrument.

“It’s Hawaiian.” Uncle Miles pushed Lily’s hand away. “And it’s not a plaything.”

“You can’t even read music.” Aunt Tate sat down and scooted her chair in. “Here,” she said, handing him the tureen. “And what were you doing at the pawnshop?”

“Stopped in on my way home. Just lookin’.” Uncle Miles gave himself a generous helping of chicken and dumplings.

“Talk about money down the drain.” Aunt Tate shook her head.

Lily found it strange that any part of her could feel sorry for Uncle Miles. And to realize that it was Aunt Tate who held the upper hand, not her uncle.

“You’ll see,” he said. “And you’ll be begging me to serenade you.” Uncle Miles laid aside his knife and fork, floated one hand in the air, and began singing a Patsy Cline song.

His voice was awful, and Lily couldn’t help it—she laughed into her hand and looked across the table at her aunt, who stuck her fingers in her ears, rolled her eyes, and smiled right back at Lily.

AUNT TATE HAD been wrong about Lily being able to leave her sorrow behind in the house that used to be home. Sorrow was not so easily fooled; it stuck to the soles of Lily’s feet and dogged her every step. It was an undercurrent to every breath.

Lily stood on the sidewalk in front of Aunt Tate ’s American Beauty rosebush. Making sure that the coast was clear, she dropped down on all fours and began dragging her right knee along the rough pavement, shredding the skin. It burned, but she kept going, checked the raw skin often, and only stopped when she was certain that the wound was serious enough to merit Aunt Tate’s attention. The blood ran down Lily’s leg, into the top of her knee sock. Straightening her cotton twill dress, Lily picked up her schoolbooks and went inside.

Aunt Tate said, “You need to be more careful,” as she painted Lily’s knee with the bright red Mercurochrome that Dawn had called monkey’s blood. When Aunt Tate softly placed a square of gauze over the skinned knee, when she used the fingernail scissors to cut strips of white adhesive tape and was careful not to hurt Lily as she pressed the tape to Lily’s leg, Lily felt cared for, reassured. As if she mattered.

Lily created other injuries. She “fell” off of a curb and for good measure bravely struck her ankle three times with the heaviest rock she could find. She knocked her forehead against a doorknob. She burst her lower lip and gave herself a black eye on a rung of the playground ladder. Yet, it wasn’t until Aunt Tate taught Lily how to use a razor blade to scrape hard-water stains from windowpanes that Lily realized she could turn the blade on herself, at last finding blissful release.

LILY’S TEACHER ANNOUNCED that there was a special, last-day-of-school assembly. Along with her fourth-grade classmates, Lily sat on the polished gymnasium floor and then looked up to see the Aviator standing at the podium. He wore his navy blue dress uniform with the gold wings and rows of medals and ribbons, and in his hand was his uniform cap.