I wasn't afraid to pretend, to dream, and to imagine anything. I'd blink and see sunlight
glimmering off mounds of snow that looked like coconut. and Daddy seemed to know that those sorts of days, days that threatened to depress us, were days when he should bring home surprises, whether it be a bouquet of Mama's favorite baby roses, a new doll for me, or some game for Brenda. Back then, he bought her a Ping-Pong table and rackets. a Wiffle ball and bat, a new tennis racket, and a set of golf clubs. She played every sport well, even though she eventually favored basketball and volleyball because of her height and speed. As soon as Daddy realized that, he put up a basketball net and backboard in our driveway.
Mama said that back then, his friends kidded him about trying to turn his daughter into the son he didn't have. Mama and Daddy had stopped having children after I was born. I never asked why. Brenda told me it was because Daddy wouldn't be able to stand having three girls. He was already outnumbered so much. However, we couldn't help believing it had something to do with Mama's health. because I had been such a difficult birth, and in the end, she had to have a cesarean delivery. In the back of my mind. I couldn't prevent myself from thinking that if it weren't for me. Daddy might have had the son he wanted.
No one ever made me feel guilty about it. No one even so much as hinted at my birth being the problem. Despite it all, we were truly the perfect family in the eyes of all our neighbors and family friends.
I used to wish that we would be frozen in time. While most of my friends were hoping the hands would spin quickly over the faces of their clocks and watches so that they could drive their own cars, be able to stay out later and later on weekends, have dramatic heart-shattering romances, and collect boyfriends like butterflies, pinning their pictures on the walls. I tried to tread time the way I would tread water. I wanted Mama and Daddy to be forever as young as they were, still passionate about each other, always holding hands or hugging and kissing.
At an early age, I noticed that the parents of my friends didn't stand as close to each other, didn't touch or look at each other as much as my parents did. I would hover close by, believing that just being in their shadow, bathing in their laughter and their smiles, was enough to protect me forever and ever.
Brenda wasn't as sensitive to all this as I was, and she certainly wasn't interested in freezing time. She was anxious about trying out for college varsity teams and competing seriously in games where she could excel and win the appreciation and interest of people who could further her athletic career. Adolescence seemed to be more of a nuisance. She would get absolutely impossible when she had her period. On more than one occasion, she wondered aloud why boys' lives weren't equally interrupted. by weren't their rhythms changed, their energy sapped, their moods depressed?
"If I could change my sex," she once whispered to me. "I'd do it in a heartbeat." The very thought of such a thing made my own heart race. I had nightmares in which Brenda grew a mustache, but more frightening than anything was the idea of her having a boy's sex organ. Once. I dreamed of surprising her in the bathroom after she had taken a shower and seeing her cover herself just a second or two too late. That dream woke me. and I sat up quickly, my heart pounding, my skin clammy. I was only twelve then. Brenda was nearly fifteen and close to five-foot- eleven inches tall. She took after Daddy's side of the family. He was six-foot-three and his father had been six-foot-five. Mama was five-foot-ten herself.
I had fears of being so short people would think I wasn't really a part of the family or that I had been malformed. My body grew out more than up. I had bigger bones than Brenda and already wider hips. My weight went first into my thighs and spread around to my rear. It crept up my back and thickened my waist. By the time I was twelve. I was one hundred fifty pounds. Even though I was overweight from the age of seven on. neither Mama nor Daddy made much of it. Mama used to say. "She'll grow out of it as she gets older and taller."
I grew older. but I wasn't growing all that much taller. I was still five-foot-three, and it began to look as if when I had wished time would freeze, it had, but it had frozen only for me.
Another reason I felt out of place was that I was not half the athlete Brenda was. She didn't like to play any sport with me because I was so poor at it. I was no match for her in Ping- Pong. and I was pathetic when it came to basketball, half the time not even reaching the rim with a shot, and when I threw a baseball-- or anything, for that matter-- she would complain that I threw just like a girl.
What did that mean? I wondered. I was a zirl. Board games were my specialty. I could give her a challenge at checkers or backgammon, but she never had the patience to sit for hours playing board games. Through rain and snow, wind and gray skies.
Brenda would be outside shooting baskets, practicing her putt for golf, or just running to stay in shape. She was driven. Daddy used to say proudly. "That girl has drive. She loves competition."
Brenda did love competition, and she loved winning the most. She never played for the fun of it. When she and Daddy played basketball, she would work hard at defeating him. He was good, too, so it was always a battle. If he so much as seemed to let her win. she would rant at him and tell him she didn't need his charity. That would get him angry.
"Charity, huh?" he would puff, and they would play harder, play for keeps, and if she beat him, which she often did, her face would fill with a satisfied glow that made him shake his head as if he didn't
understand her at all, as if she weren't his daughter but some stranger.
Daddy had been a very good athlete in both high school and college. He had his certificates and his trophies, and staying in good health was very important to him. He was always exercising, claiming the physical activity helped him to be a sharper thinker and gave him more energy when others were faltering. In that regard, he was far closer to Brenda than he was to me, but when I was younger, he did think I was cuter, more lovable. He called me his panda bear, because I had Mama's coal-black hair and alabaster complexion, with ebony eyes he said were panda bear button eyes. One of the first stuffed toys he bought me was a panda bear. I kept it with me in bed, lying against the pillows when the bed was made. I kept it under the blanket with me when I went to sleep. I called it Mr. Panda and often carried on long conversations with it, rattling away as if I really expected the stuffed toy would suddenly come to life, like toys in the movies, and reply.
Brenda made fun of that when she heard me. Mama thought it was cute, and at one time, so did Daddy, but when he became Mr. Hyde, he mocked it and told me I should put my panda bear in a carton in a closet or give it to a younger girl.
"Where are your real friends?" he would demand. "You don't get invited to parties or anyone's house, and do you know why. April? I'll tell you why. You're too overweight. You won't have any social life. Go on a diet," he ordered.
He wasn't wrong. I didn't have an
y social life. I had never had a boyfriend, and the only friends I had at school were other girls who had never had boyfriends and had none now. No one asked us to dances or parties, and what bothered me a little was the fact that I had never had a heart-throbbing crush on any boy, either. It was a sensitive area for Brenda as well, and she was quick to come to my defense.
"People should be friends with her because of who she is, not because of what she looks like," Brenda told Daddy when he criticized me.
"Oh? And who is she?" he countered. "Mrs. Panda Bear?" I could hardly breathe. My throat tightened, and my chest constricted. Could a girl my age get a heart attack? I wondered.
I quickly retreated to my room and closed the door. I wanted to be like Brenda and never cry in front of him, but it was harder for me. Maybe I just had more tears inside me than she had. Thank goodness I had my own room, my own sanctuary. He had stopped barging in on me after I was about ten. Mama had told him I was a young lady and that he had to recognize the fact. He wasn't upset about it.
In fact, his face lit up with happiness at the time, and he nodded at the three of us around the dinner table, declaring he had three beautiful women in his home. How could he go so quickly from that sort of a daddy to Mr. Hyde?
I imagined all sorts of fantastic answers. His body had become inhabited by some evil spirit, a poltergeist, or maybe even an extraterrestrial. Someone had cloned him, and the clone had an entirely different personality. Or maybe it was just as Mama had told us when it all began. "He is being this way now because he is afraid you will be too weak or we won't be perfect enough. He doesn't mean to be so cruel. It's just tough love."
Brenda smirked at that. "Yeah, right." she said, which was always her way of saying That's stupid.
Her room was right next to mine. We lived in a sprawling ranch-stye home with bay windows in the dining room and large picture windows in the living room. Brenda's and my bedrooms were on one side. and Daddy and Mama's master bedroom was on the other. Daddy had a small wood-paneled office off his bedroom, the living room was large, and the dining room was right next to the kitchen so that Mama had a pass- through window. Our furnishings were all contemporary. Mama liked what she called the clean, simple look. None of it was inexpensive, but in those days. Daddy rarely, if ever, complained about anything she bought. After he became Mr. Hyde-, nothing she bought was right or sensible, even dawn to the brand of milk.
When Brenda and I were growing up, money was never a concern. However, neither she nor I was wasteful or ungrateful for the things we had. We never took anything for granted or whined for expensive toys or clothes. Brenda never even asked Daddy to get her a car when she was sixteen, even though most of her friends and teammates had their own cars, even ones who came from families far less wealthy than ours. She passed her driving test, got her license, and drove Mama's car whenever Mama told her she could. She rarely, if ever, asked Daddy for his car. He used to offer it to her, but when he became Mr. Hyde, he wouldn't, even if he had no use for it and it meant Brenda had to beg someone to pick her up for a special practice or a game. A few times, she had to take the bus.
Because our house was bigger than most nearby and we had a larger lot in an upscale neighborhood of Hickory, a suburban community ninety miles from downtown Memphis, people and our classmates assumed we were very rich. Daddy was a successful business attorney, as his father had been. I couldn't remember my paternal grandfather, because he died of heart failure before I was two, and my paternal grandmother had died four years before that of cancer. Daddy lost his older sister. Marissa, to cancer as well. I was too young at the time to remember much detail. and Mama shielded me more from the sadness. but Brenda could recall how our aunt grew gaunt and pale. She said she was like a room full of light darkening and darkening.