By Ryan-Ashley Anderson
The Youngsville realtor had no answers when we asked why the trees at the edge of the woods bent sideways, why the puddles towards the back were neon green, or where the water came from that fed the pond across the street from our house. We were fine with not having answers because this was the only house my parents could afford, and it seemed like they were trying not to pick at a thing we could not change.
This was the first house that either of my parents had owned, so it did not matter that the yard—camel-colored packed mud, dry and cracked as a sun-baked desert—would be impossible to seed; it did not matter that the house was too small and poorly made with paper-thin walls; and it did not matter that the neighborhood our house sat outside of was filled with people my mother had already decided we would want nothing to do with.
Our new house sat at the edge of Horseshoe Acres—the only real neighborhood in our town of 900—and Horseshoe Acres sat in a valley below the farmland that surrounded us. The town consisted of a single intersection and around that intersection sat everything a person from a town like this might need—a gas station, a diner, a Piggly Wiggly grocery, a video rental store, a small doctor’s office, a post office, a bank, and a small strip of three antique shops.
While moving in, my mother got agitated by what she characterized as inappropriate attention from the neighbors. Curtains were pulled to the side, people stood on their back porches looking in our general direction, and cars seemed to slow as they passed our house.
“Don’t these people have anything better to do than to spy on us?” my mother complained. “Haven’t they ever seen somebody move in before?”
“They’re probably just curious about us,” my step-father explained.
“Let’s. Go. Say. Hi!” I begged between strained breaths while playing tug of war with my dog, Kentucky.
After a few days had passed and most of our boxes were unpacked, I convinced my parents to walk the neighborhood and introduce ourselves to all the people we wouldn’t be spending time with. I hoped some of these people had kids my age and that, once my mother met them, she’d realize they were fine and then let me play with them. I pulled on my shoes and fantasized about Friday night sleepovers—giggling over J.T.T. from Home Improvement, arguing about the proper way to sing the chorus of Hanson’s “MMMBop,” freezing each other’s bras like I’d heard some of the older girls talk about in Girl Scouts. I’d never had a real sleepover but I imagined they went something like that. In fact, I hadn’t really lived anywhere long enough to make real friends, and I was nervous. I wondered how I should act to make sure all the kids liked me, and practiced introducing myself in the bathroom mirror.
“Hi,” I said, hand extended for a shake, “My name’s Ryan, what’s yours?” No, that wasn’t right. Kids don’t shake hands. At least, here they probably didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for them to think I was some pretentious asshole. I did, however, want them to think I was smart. It was basically the only thing I had going for me.
“Hey, I’m Ryan. Who are you?” No, that sounded lazy and rude and my mother would never let me hear the end of an introduction like that.
“Hi! I’m Ryan! Want to play?” No, no, no. That definitely went against the rule of not spending time with these people and I’d be opening a can of worms my mom would have to spend years sealing back up.
“Hi.” That’s better. Be quiet, be small, be good. “Hi” wouldn’t get me into trouble. It gave nothing, asked nothing, and made no invitation. Perfect. I practiced saying hi with my mouth while pleading please invite me in to play with my eyes.
Right before we left for the walk, my mother said, “Remember, don’t tell anyone here anything about our family. They are not our friends and don’t need to know our business.”
Just a couple door-knocks into our stroll and my mother’s suspicions were confirmed—those people were not our people and we were to do everything in our power to ensure they didn’t think we were one of them. Those people smoked in the house, watched television at all hours of the day, and let their kids run around barefoot. Those people kept their dogs chained up in the backyard (we would never do that to Kentucky, I thought), swore out loud, drank in front of their kids, and had bad teeth. My mom always told me that these were the kinds of things poor people did. And we weren’t poor. Poor kids ran around outside without shoes on. It was how they got worms, she’d said. And the implication was that we don’t get sick with the same kinds of things as poor people because we are educated; we know better; we are better. I saw lots of kids playing outside during our walk, the bottoms of their feet caked with earth. I felt bad for them. They probably had worms and didn’t even know it. I wondered if I should warn them. I imagined what it would feel like to have a pile of worms twisting around inside my stomach and was perfectly happy to do whatever I must to avoid that. My mom was already mad about how often I needed to go to the doctor and worms was definitely on the list of preventable ailments I’d be punished for.
*
When I was a baby, I had bad ear infections. So bad that the doctor wanted to do surgery. For whatever reason, the surgery never happened and I ended up with scars on my ear drums. As I got older, I had to be really careful. If I wasn’t wearing special ear plugs, I wasn’t allowed to get my head wet at the pool, for example. If someone splashed my face or I forgot and did a cannonball, I’d get inconsolably upset. I’d push my beach towel as far into my ears as I could, to get all the water out, but I’d often still end up with an ache anyway. I’d try to hide it from my mom, but she could always tell. For days during an earache, she would obsessively inspect my ears after baths and showers, making sure no water was left behind that might nudge the ache into infection territory and I let her, because an infection meant a doctor’s visit, and a doctor’s visit meant time off work, and time off work meant we wouldn’t have enough money, and that was a big problem because my mom didn’t want to be poor.
By the time I was three, she was carting me back and forth to court-ordered physical exams and therapy appointments. Some stuff about my dad that I didn’t fully understand. Just that there were lots of stuffed dolls involved and, after it was all over, I wasn’t allowed to be alone with him again unless a legal chaperone was present.
The year we moved to Youngsville, I’d also been diagnosed with a skin condition, lactose-intolerance, and some phantom digestion issue that made my body turn all my food into big, impassable lumps. I was on lots of medications for that. Laxatives that made me vomit, and pills for the heartburn caused by the vomit. And the worst part was that it didn’t even make things much better. I’d alternate between explosive diarrhea in the middle of the school day (often shitting my pants and needing my mom to bring me a change of clothes) and hours on the toilet at home, with a huge lump of shit sticking a quarter of the way out of my ass, crying and begging for it to pass. I really didn’t need to add worms to the list.
*
I was careful not to act too excited during our walk. I really liked everyone we met but didn’t want my mom to notice. She would have felt betrayed. She was a very “with me or against me” type of person. When their doors opened, I could smell how different our neighbors’ homes were from ours—smoky, warm, and sweet—and I could see how different they looked inside. These were not the homes of people who ate boiled chicken and broccoli every night for dinner and kept everything tidy and sparkling. No, these were clearly pizza people—people whose walls were covered with family photos, whose floors were covered in toys, who shouted dinner time into the void from the back porch at dusk each evening. Most of them were friendly and easygoing. I noticed they didn’t seem to think too hard about things before they said them, or worry much about what we thought. I wondered how I might be more like that. I wondered if I’d get a chance to learn.
Turns out, I would spend most Friday evenings at home, watching ABC’s T.G.I.F. programming block on my own or with my mom and step-dad. I didn’t talk to them about how much I liked J.T.T. because little girls weren’t supposed to think of little boys like that. My mom was already worried that I was too ‘mature’ for my age, so I just kept it to myself.
*
We soon discovered that heavy rains made the pond across the street flood and push over into our yard where it then sat for days atop the unyielding clay before finally, slowly, finding its way back into the ground. We learned that the little creek in the far back would darken and swell and overtake that end of the yard, reaching toward the bent-over trees, making mosquito birthing grounds of my new favorite hangout spot. We stayed out of the yard and away from the woods when it was wet out. On dry days, though, the backyard was mine. Sometimes I’d lay across the crooked trunks at the edge of the woods, imagine my body was part of the tree, and wonder if it felt me there. On others, I’d crawl through the brush to explore. I liked to get far away from the house and pretend to get lost. I wondered if my parents would search for me and secretly worried that they wouldn’t.
While I was out there, I searched for the lime green, electric looking puddles. They seemed like the stuff monsters were made of, and something told me not to touch them. Instead, I poked at the greasy water with a stick and watched the oil make magic on the surface where large mosquitos sat, miraculously without sinking.
*
That first summer, my mother became obsessed with growing grass. The days were made of endless trips to the hardware store where we could never seem to get enough grass seed, mulch, and fertilizer. We rented aerators and seed-spreading machines and the three of us—my step-father, my mother, and I—worked together like a solid little army, synchronized and determined to make something grow. While my mother used the aerating machine, I’d beat at the earth with a metal rake, and my step-father would follow closely behind with the seed-spreader. I helped by adding more seed when it started to run low, and after, we would take turns watering. By the end of the summer, our yard looked like it had been fitted with hair plugs. Grass grew frail and sparse and my mother made sure none of us walked on or cut it until it was strong. How long would that take, I wondered?
On days my mother started drinking early—early enough that the sun was still high in the sky—I took advantage of her condition. I’d swear that, if she would let me play outside, I wouldn’t mess up a single blade of grass. I’d only walk on the dry spots, between the blades, I’d tell her, and then just hang out in the far back where it was all dirt and moss anyway and there was nothing to worry about me ruining.
*
Even a couple summers into living there, I really hadn’t made any friends. Me and the other kids, we weren’t the same. But it wasn’t because of money—I’d realized by now that we were pretty much in the same boat as them, if not worse off—it was because I was a difficult kid with a difficult mother and other people’s parents just didn’t want to deal. The stomach issues were also a complicating factor. What was some other parent supposed to do when the neighbor kid got stuck in their only bathroom for hours? It was always just easier to be close to home if something wasn’t feeling right, so I spent a lot of time back there in the yard on my own. I’d talk to the trees or sit by the creek, looking deep down to see what was inside. Sometimes I looked so closely that I’d start to lose my balance. I’d imagine falling in and sinking down, deeper and deeper and deeper. I wondered if it would be cold down there or if, at some point, temperature starts losing meaning. I wondered if there were creatures and could have sworn I saw the long, thick body once of a prehistoric-looking snake.
I wanted Kentucky to hang out with me back there—something about having him around made me want to disappear less—but my mom said he had to stay up at the house on the chain, or in the garage. He didn’t know how to be careful with the grass, she said. But I’d get lonely back there talking to myself, so I started pretending that one of the weirdly-shaped trees was a person.
And I named that weird person-like tree Jonathan.
I was eight by this point. It was 1995. I was still watching Home Improvement and my crush on J.T.T. had grown into a bit of an obsession. Especially since his role as Simba in The Lion King the previous year. I’d cried desperately along with Simba when his father Mufasa was trampled in the wildebeest stampede and I wondered if knowing that would endear me to him one day.
So when I saw an advertisement for his fan club in a copy of Teen Beat Magazine during one of our trips to the Piggly Wiggly, I ripped out the page and pocketed it. I just had to join. At home, I emptied the piggy bank I’d squirreled a little cash and coins away in, stuffed the money into an envelope along with the entry form, put it in the mailbox across the street by the pond, with the flag up high, and awaited my personalized letter and fan kit from J.T.T.
I started fantasizing about a life with him and imagined the reactions on people’s faces when I told them the story of how we met—Oh it was WILD! It all started with a fan club when we were both kids. We just started writing letters back and forth and, eventually, his parents flew me out to meet him in person and join them on set for the taping of one of the Home Improvement episodes. It was just…love at first sight…and it’s been happily ever after ever since.
I really thought it could happen. That this was how things did happen. That this was how little girls like me found a way out of towns so small they’d like to squeeze the life and dreams and future right out of you.
I started spending time with tree J.T.T. in the afternoons, rehearsing conversations I imagined having with him in real life someday. At first, I’d sit across from him and talk ‘face to face.’ Soon, I was sitting against the tree, imagining J.T.T.’s arms wrapped around me. I asked him, between soft kisses, whether I should call him J.T.T. or Jonathan, and started rubbing my body against the bark.
I was mostly hidden from view, but my heart raced and my palms slipped with sweat during intimate moments like this. I was terrified of getting caught, so I’d keep one eye trained on the back porch where my mom tended to sit, talking on the phone with friends and drinking wine after a long day. I knew that if she saw me, she’d stop allowing me to play out there by myself. I had a sense that I was damaged, and that everything she did was to keep the seams sewed up tight so none of that would ever spill out in front of other people. She was always talking to me about how important it was to be appropriate. She’d probably even take me back to the therapist, but I was too old to play with dolls now.
So I’d stand there quietly, secretly, hidden just out of view, and coo, “J.T.T., oh, J.T.T., I’m your biggest fan. I love you, J.T.T.,” while grinding against the tree’s rough, bark-covered trunk, “ … and I think you could love me, too. You will love me, too. One day. You’ll see.”
Ryan-Ashley Anderson is a conceptual artist and writer from the rural South. She has publications in X-R-A-Y and Icebreakers among others, work forthcoming in Rejection Letters and Vlad Mag, and is an editor at Pool Party Mag. Anderson is currently writing a memoir about sex work, the patriarchy, and belonging, and pursuing dual masters degrees in critical studies and art.
