Hapa Girl: A Memoir

8. Hunting Season

Often, that autumn, I woke up in the middle of the night with sharp pains radiating up and down my calves. I was twelve and growing rapidly. Soon hips would be jutting out where once I’d had straight lines, my waistline would shrink, breasts would bud, hair would appear in embarrassing places. My skin took on an unfamiliar sheen and developed a new smell. I didn’t like what was happening to me. It was as though I’d followed Alice down the rabbit hole and eaten something I shouldn’t have. I was growing in places, shrinking in others. I hardly knew what to make of myself. In a matter of weeks, my feet wouldn’t fit into my shoes. My good New Jersey shoes, I thought. The kind that matched exactly my best friend Theresa’s shoes. We got them at the same time when Mrs. Gilfedder took us shopping for school clothes. I was leaving, moving away, but we were going to dress alike, just as though I were still there. And so Theresa bought two pairs of Lee jeans from the Jeans Depot in Pompton Plains, turquoise and pink, and I bought two as well, in pink and banana. She bought her shiny lamé bomber jacket in banana and I got mine in turquoise. She got striped black-and-white Adidas sneakers and blue suede dress shoes; ditto for me. This was what all the cool kids in junior high wore, and we were going to be cool, too. Not like in sixth grade, when we still wore clothes our mothers had ordered from the Sears catalog or, worse, sewn for us from scratch. 8 Hunting Season Now I woke up one morning and my good New Jersey shoes didn’t fit. I hadn’t even been gone a month. I wrote a letter to Theresa, dropping hints. I didn’t want to say outright, I can’t wear our shoes, what about you? But I asked her if she had any trouble keeping them clean and she replied, no, her father cleaned the suede for her on weekends. I knew then that there wasn’t any chance she might be getting new shoes, shoes that we might be able to pick out together long distance. I was changing and my best friend was not. The one shoe store in town was a disappointment. It was very small, and rather than specializing in children, let alone girls, it carried shoes for everybody, for every season, including work boots, cowboy boots, hunting boots, galoshes, slippers, sneakers, some of the plainest loafers I’d ever encountered in my life, and vinyl “dress” shoes. The shoe salesman lost the last shred of respect I had for him when he tried to sell me a pair of wedge heels with a hole cut out of the wedge. Didn’t he know that those were just so fifth grade? “All the other girls in junior high are wearing them,” he promised me, but I was having none of it. I couldn’t believe that our town was two years behind the fashion cycle, at least. My mother tried to make excuses for me, and I went over to examine the three styles of sneakers. That’s when the salesman made his second big mistake. “Hey, aren’t you living in the O’Brien place?” he asked my mother. “No,” she replied. “It’s our place now.” “Well, just the same. Nice place. I was thinking of driving out there this weekend and shooting me a pheasant.” “Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t allow hunting on our property.” “Why, sure you do! It’s the law. I can hunt anywhere I want.” “No, I’m afraid you’re wrong. The law states that there’s no hunting on private property that’s been posted. And there’s no hunting within three hundred feet of a house. We’ve already marked our fields, and the area around our house is off limits as well.” There had been several articles about the start of the hunting season in the local paper and my mother had read them carefully. She 58 • Chapter 8 herself did not approve of guns or shooting. She had wanted to make sure our property would be safe for our dogs and for my brother and me. There was no point in moving to the country if...