Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone Page A

loved her brother best and her older sisters next best. “He was always The Boy and they were The Girls, and Ma was proud of how well they did in school,” she explained again and again to the walls, the stove, the floor she was mopping, “and I was just Doris. I was average.”
    Knowing how my grandmother had misjudged my mother, I felt guilty about how much I longed for her visits. I loved my grandmother and her fresh supply of stories about the children who went to the schools she taught, the games they played, and the books they read. School for me was an emblem of the world outside our creek-bottom meadows and fenced mountain slopes. At eight, I was still being taught at home; our gumbo road was impassable for most of the school months, and my father preferred that we be kept safe from contact with “them damn town kids,” as he called them. Subversively I begged my grandmother to repeat her stories again and again, and I tried to imagine what it must be like to see other children every day and to have a real desk and real lessons. Other than my little sister, my playmates were mostly cats. But my grandmother brought with her the breath of elsewhere.
    My mother’s resentment whitened in intensity during the weeks before a visit from my grandmother, smoldered during the visit itself, and flared up again as soon as my grandmother was safely down the road to her next school. “I wonder if she ever realizes she wouldn’t even have any grandchildren if I hadn’t got married and had some kids! The Girls never had any kids! Some people should never have kids! Some people should never get married!”
    With a child’s logic, I thought she was talking about me. I thought I was responsible for her anger. I was preoccupied for a long time with a story I had read about a fisherman who was granted three wishes; he had used his wishes badly, but I was sure I could do better, given the chance. I thought a lot about how I would use three wishes, how I would use their potential for lifting me out of the present.
    “What would you wish for, if you had three wishes?” I prodded my mother.
    She turned her faraway gray eyes on me, as though she had not been ranting about The Girls the moment before. “I’d wish you’d be good,” she said.
    That was what she always said, no matter how often I asked her. With everything under the sun to wish for, that unfailing answer was a perplexity and a worry.
    I was my grandmother’s namesake, and I was a bookworm like my mother’s older sisters. Nobody could pry my nose out of a book to do my chores, even though I was marked to be the outdoor-working child, even though I was supposed to be my father’s boy.
    Other signs that I was not a boy arose to trouble us both and account, I thought, for my mother’s one wish.
    “Mary’s getting a butt on her just like a girl,” she remarked one night as I climbed out of the tub. Alarmed, I craned my neck to see what had changed about my eight-year-old buttocks.
    “Next thing, you’ll be mooning in the mirror and wanting to pluck your eyebrows just like the rest of ’em,” she said.
    “I will not,” I said doubtfully.
    I could find no way through the contradiction. On the one hand, I was a boy (except that I also was a bookworm), and my chores were always in the barns and corrals, never the kitchen. You don’t know how to cook on a woodstove? my mother-in-law was to cry in disbelief. And you grew up on a ranch?
    To act like a boy was approved; to cry or show fear was to invite ridicule. Sissy! Big bellercalf! On the other hand, I was scolded for hanging around the men, the way ranch boys did. I was not a boy (my buttocks, my vanity). What was I?
    “Your dad’s boy,” my mother answered comfortingly when I asked her. She named a woman I knew. “Just like Hazel. Her dad can’t get along Without her.”
    Hazel was a tough, shy woman who rode fences and pulled calves and took no interest in the country dances or the “running around”