When The Girls Try by Zoë E. Wilson

The cat-sitter is on the lime green couch with her legs open in the air, head dangling on the floor. Her name is Daisy-Lily Miller, this is not her occupation; she just happens to be cat-sitting for the poet whose house is just down the street from hers. Daisy likes to search up flower names on the library computer at school. Once, she found out that there were ninety varieties of lilies. It was unsurprising that her mother had chosen one that did not exist. 

Dazed little mill is what her father calls her. This is because when her parents talk to her, she rolls her eyes back into the darkness of her lids and pretends she can’t hear. Daisy is twelve, with one foot in girlhood, the other in the poet’s house. At school, the poet walks through hallways and always says hello. She teaches the eighth grade, is the older girls favorite. Daisy cannot wait to be in her class but for now, Daisy is getting paid ten dollars a day to feed the poet’s cat and spend an hour in its company. She has to do this for a whole week, but Daisy is not complaining. The house is cool, and her parents can’t bother her. In the poet’s house, no one asks anything. Daisy is free.

It is the beginning of August, everything is dusty and brown. Daisy’s teacher said the valley they live in was once a glacial lake that drained in a great flood. If there was still water and ice, Daisy imagines it would quiet and there would be no hot wind like her parents voices. 

When she looks up at the great hills she can see grooves of the high water mark, like where her legs meet her torso, and the slow shallow river divides. 

Today, Daisy brought a paper bag full of cherries with her. She lifts the window which overlooks the backyard, just enough so that if she turns her face and blows pits into the tomato plant, the cat can’t escape. She shucks the cherries clean with her front teeth, tries to get each pit through the plastic corral of the planter. She wonders if the poet will notice. Daisy’s mother would notice. Daisy’s mother would get mad. She is particular and yells when Daisy makes messes.

 The cat is watching her. It’s head is tilted sideways like Daisy’s math teacher’s does Daisy asks bad questions. The cat is possessive over the house. It mews at Daisy and scratches the carpets when she spends too long in one room. Daisy feels like her mother and tells the cat to be quiet. 

After Daisy finishes her cherries, she returns to the photo album she left open and flips through it like a magazine. There are many scenes: mountains, the poet in scuba gear, friends, a bunch of flowers, the poet all dressed up for a party. She flips, stopping at a photo of the same backyard she’s been spitting cherry pits into. In the photo the poet is naked, sprawled open in the grass. Daisy looks at the photo with the soft delight of intrusion. When she tips her head down, towards the photo, Daisy feels tingly above her ribcage, as if her heart had fallen asleep and is just waking up. In the photo, the poet appears content, as if it is natural to be so exposed. Daisy’s mother is not the sort of woman to walk around naked.

Daisy knows she should feel wrong snooping, but she doesn’t. Besides, the album was on the coffee table, accessible. The photo makes Daisy feel close to the poet, different from her mother. She feels like she is understanding something when she lays there with the fan.  Daisy had discovered the fan yesterday when she accidentally stepped over it wearing a skirt. The cool pressure had opened her up—she didn’t know to what exactly, only that her face flushed and tingling spread in her body. Now, she angles it between her knees, put the pressure on high and tries finding herself again. 

The playground is Daisy’s favorite part of the neighborhood. It is where the girls from other streets come to dangle their feet off the edge of the slide, their knees crooked in like puppets. The top roost of the slide and the monkey bars are the girls’ domain. They hang off the hot bars, making their limbs long before dropping softly onto the wood chips. In the summer, playgrounds can be reclaimed by anyone. The older teenagers make circles on skateboards near the basketball hoops, their swoops effortless. New mothers huddle, barricaded behind strollers beneath the maple trees, rocking back and forth in their sandals. 

Where Daisy is at the monkey bars, the girls dip their heads conspiratorially. They talk about which teachers they will have next school year if they should run track or play the trombone. They drag their toes in half circles on the ground. Everyone’s movements are slow, like sand funneling through fingers. Daisy notices the pink straps of Eliza’s bra, Daisy wants one. When Daisy and her mother go shopping, Daisy is envious of the drooping breasts of the grocery store clerk who still pats her head.

Each day, Daisy enters the poet’s house through the garage, which is filled with boxes. Daisy notices plastic pieces of a nativity scene next to the workbench. In the living room, Daisy reads some of the poet’s poems in a thick-papered review. The poems are unlike anything Daisy has read in class. The words are short and hard. Daisy wants to know why the poet writes about Mary and decency and what it means to be good. She tilts her neck back on the couch, she can hear the wind chime outside. Daisy thought all poets were atheists. 

 Daisy has to scour the house to find the cat. Sometimes it hides in the poets’ closet or in the basement where the lights don’t turn on. Today it is basking in the white tub, licking itself, primping its tabby cat hair. The tub is not deep. On the ledge Daisy sees an army of lavender bars of soap, identical to the ones her mother takes from hotel rooms. There is also a razor. Daisy has peach fuzz, her mother calls it. She wants smooth legs, not blonde legs. 

Today is real hot, like her dad says, a real hot day. Usually, the heat doesn’t bother Daisy. Today it bolts closer to her skin and gives Daisy a feeling like one of her mother’s migraines. Daisy gets in the tub. She takes off her clothes. The cat gets out and watches her, then leaves through the open door. Daisy mostly just wants to be cooled off, she turns on the water. She dances her fingers on the tops of the soap bars like piano keys. She uses the poet’s razor to shave her legs, she makes a small cut on the folds of her heel. She scootches towards the streaming faucet and lifts her foot to rinse the blade and the blood. She wonders what a faucet can do. She moves into something she doesn’t have words for. Her body becomes hot and then cold all at once.

Daisy tells the girls at the playground about the fan and the tub. She says it feels like your body becomes a river. Slowly throughout the week the girls in the neighborhood try. They move beyond giggling. They tell each other quietly, afraid of echoes like in the school’s gymnasium. One girl states, “I think this means we are women.” Daisy doesn’t think so. Another girl says they should try it with their hands. Each day when dinner time comes the girls are like drops of water on a pond. They spread outwards from the playground to their separate houses, connected in a concentric circle by their discovery. 

When Sunday comes it is only Daisy at the playground. She waits on the hot plastic at the bottom of the slide. She doesn’t like being the only one at the playground. The wood chips and the play equipment doesn’t move and the birds are loud. When Daisy comes home, her mother is angry—one of the other girls had been caught. 

The news spreads like a game of telephone. The parents fuel each other until panic edges into anger, which borders on something else. At Daisy’s house, the phone rings and rings. In loud voices, the parents say things like, “This is what our girls are doing? This is what our girls are doing.” Then the question, “But where did they learn such a thing?” The answer finds its way through the mothers and fathers from their daughters—who said it because they did not know any better. “From Daisy, it was Daisy,” they say.

Daisy is told to sit down at the kitchen table. She pretends she does not know what for, and when they begin to talk, she rolls her eyes back in her head, and tries not to hear. Her father’s voice is tight, controlled.

“Daisy Miller, where did you learn such a thing?” 

Daisy sits still. 

“Do you know what they are saying about you?” her mother says. “What they will do to you? What will we have to do now?”

 Daisy doesn’t have time to answer. Her mother leans forward, puts a collection of poems on the kitchen table.  

“Did you learn it from this book? You must have.” Daisy’s mother speaks in a voice that is shrill but not loud. 

Daisy had only borrowed the book from the poet’s house, but she doesn’t have time to answer. She watches her mother and father build silent resolutions at the table. Daisy knows the poet might agree with her parents,. She can tell what she did is wrong, but she is unsure why. She doesn’t say that either. 

She sits and watches as they begin to call the other parents. They assure them that the matter has been dealt with. Her father’s voice says: it’s a misunderstanding, sir, it wasn’t our daughter. Her mother tells each of the other parents that of course it was that woman, it was the poet and her dirty poetry. This is a lie, but they have to blame someone. 

It is the first week of September, the girls return to school. The fires have settled into smudged lead. At breakfast, Daisy’s parents tell her to be good. After the fourth bell, the students tumble out with air pumped four-square balls, kicking bigger shoes into newly ground woodchips. The playground is controlled again by the hierarchy of grades, and summer rules no longer apply. The girls congregate by the swing set. They are now too old for the slide and the monkey-bars.  

The girls have shiny hair and sport tank tops with ruffles and jean shorts. Overnight, it seems they have become a matching pack. Some, cross their arms over the buds of breasts and crook their hips in newly stretched legs. It is cool to smack gum between their teeth and they hand pieces of spearmint around like tickets, Daisy doesn’t get one. They laugh about secrets told at a sleepover, as their hands twist and turn the strings of new bracelets tied to the edges of water bottles. Daisy leans her spine against the metal pole of the swing set, she watches the rhythm of their swing and talk. On the outskirts of the group Daisy is easily ignored. 

Daisy moves inward to sit on an empty swing. The other girls jab one another with their elbows, their wide eyes get wider. Then as if hearing a bell they hop off, one at a time. They move down the line towards the edge of the cement where the boys play basketball. It is a loud silence. Daisy knows what the other girls are thinking, what they have been told. But, her parents lie didn’t seem to work.  

Daisy hops off the edge of the swing, she watches it move like a pendulum coming to rest. As Daisy walks away towards the edge of the soccer pitch, she is intercepted by 

the eight-grade girls, they are tall and look down at Daisy like strange adults in child’s clothes. One of the girls whose father is on the school board informs Daisy that they decided to fire the poet. That now, because of Daisy, they have a man teacher who smells. The girls leave her then, floating across the playground like dandelion seeds. Daisy begins to wonder if they are right, if it is her fault. 

She sits in the dry grass with her back against the metal fence, she feels its imprint on her skin. She watches the other girls fold backwards like waves towards the swing-set. The girls take turns, the swing Daisy used remains empty, she sees now that exclusion is silent. From where Daisy is sitting she can see the poet’s cat walking on outside of the metal ringed fence, even it doesn’t seem to recognize her. 

Zoë E. Wilson’s work has been published by the American Academy of Poets as part of their University and College prizes and in other undergraduate journals. Zoë is in the process of completing a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Bowdoin College and will pursue an MFA upon graduation. Zoë grew up in Missoula, Montana, and currently lives in Maine.

11 February 2022