Can you buy a new identity at Kmart?

Mom got on the phone a little after eight and confirmed with Rhea’s mom that Rosa Morena Middle School did require girls to wear skirts to class except on Fridays and the day before a holiday. And that boys were required to wear button-up shirts with collars since Marsha had a son, Rhea’s brother, Willem, in ninth grade going here, too. She even directed Mom to find the letter the school had sent out describing the dress code in detail.

“What’s with such rules?” I complained after she let me see it. “It’s not a religious school or anything. Is it even legal?” I felt put upon and could not avoid a bit of a whine in my voice. We were both dressed and heading for the car after telling the guys where we were going.

‘The guys’ as a phrase still irked me a bit too, since it no longer included me.

Mom rolled her eyes at my tone of voice and let me see her do it. “You’ll live,” she said. “I had to put up with it when I went to school twenty years ago. Of course, the Presley elementary went K-8 back then, and we had half as many people living in the Heights.” Meaning all the little connected mountain valleys of northeast San Diego County and the neighboring areas in other counties.

I kicked a rock in our gravel driveway while Mom backed the big Ford Crown Victoria out from between the pick-ups and four-wheel drives of the ranch vehicles. I was wearing my jeans with the heart stitching on the butt, the pale green pullover teddy-bear shirt, my necklace and bracelet, and my sneakers with the rainbow laces. I had on panties and my bra for underwear, too.

And I was outside the house dressed as a girl from skin out.

Mom stopped the car with the front passenger door right in front of me. I heard the electronic lock release and opened the door. Mom was grinning at me. “Look, your shirt is the same color as the car.”

I looked. Then I closed the door and ran back to the house. I heard the electric window going down and Mom calling after me. “Audrey? Where are you going?”

“To change shirts,” I yelled back as I went through the windlock at the front of the house. I knew we still had plenty of time; the current plan was we would stop in Rosa Morena on the way, the Kmart there would be open, and we could pick up some everyday stuff, then drive north to the Tyler Mall.

In my room, I was tempted by my boy clothes. The other two tops I had, besides the blue one I had worn yesterday, were the red one, which was really a washed-out burgundy color, and the lavender. Purple, even pastels, had always been my favorite color, and I even had boy shirts in lavender.

I sighed, holding the burgundy teddy-bear shirt up beside my face. It looked all right. I tried the lavender next, and it looked better, bringing out the violet color of my eyes. I sighed, then pulled the green shirt off and the lavender one on. Of course, I had to redo my hair, which meant going to the bathroom to get my comb damp.

The process was comb my hair, then brush it back, brush it forward, brush it up from the sides, then shake my head, and last, spray with the light hold stuff that smelled like strawberry ice cream. It was kind of fun and looked really good.

Mom had waited patiently in the car for me. I guess she understood why I couldn’t wear a shirt that matched the car’s color. “Better?” she asked as I climbed in and swung the heavy door closed.

“Uh, huh,” I said, buckling up.

We got on our way, Mom remarking as we went under the squares and diamonds of the ranch gate sign, “That top is almost pink.”

“It’s not pink. It’s lavender-blue,” I said.

“We’ll get you into something pink eventually, but a cool pink will look best on you. Just one or two shades over from what you’re wearing now.”

“Argh,” I said, and she laughed.

* * *

When we got inside Kmart, Mom surprised me by heading straight for the toy department.

“What?” I said when she towed me away from the girls’ jeans.

“We don’t want the cheap clothing they have here, well, maybe a nice jeans skirt? But something you don’t have that every other girl has are some dolls.”

“Mom!” I protested.

“You do have GI Joes and don’t think I haven’t seen you play with them. You make up stories, and your Joes talk to each other and have feelings. And those Star Wars dolls we got for you two years ago.”

I know I was turning red. Pete had teased me about the way I played with my action figures. I’d inherited most of my toys from my brothers, and these were the old 12-inch Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force men. I had seven of them and a ton of their accessories, including astronaut, deep-sea diver, and superhero costumes. I hadn’t played with them much in a while, and especially not much this summer, what with everything else going on.

In fact, Pete had kinda made me feel weird back near my birthday in June when I told him that Ace, my Atomic-Man figure, was worried about how his son was doing in pre-school. He laughed at me, accused me of playing with dolls and of turning into his little sister Margery. I hadn’t touched them since.

Not even the Star Wars ones. One of the figures in the set I had gotten was Princess Leia. And I hadn’t taken any of them out of the box in months, but her figure was still in the plastic bag it came in.

“Poop,” I said out loud.

“What, hon?” Mom asked.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t want to admit it but I’d always been jealous of girls having so many neat different dolls to play with. I had HotWheels cars, too, and they were fun, but it was harder to make stories with them because they didn’t have faces.

I wanted to use a stronger word than ‘poop,’ but I kept my mouth shut.

Mom towed me behind her like a kite all the way to the doll aisles. The toy section was only half as big in summer as it would be near Christmas, but there were still two aisles full of dolls, one of Barbie-type dolls and one of baby dolls.

“Cowpie,” I said.

“You want a kewpie doll?” Mom asked. “I have one I’ve had for years. She sits on my dresser next to my jewelry box.”

I couldn’t get any redder. I tried to explain. “Mom, I’m dying here,” I told her.

She looked at me and grinned. “No, you’re not. Look around.” The store was almost empty. “No one cares which doll you choose, or if. But if you don’t choose, I will.”

“Mom!”

She made a gesture at the rows of dolls looking a challenge at me. “It’s okay, really, you’re allowed.”

I weakened. “I’m too old for dolls,” I said.

She laughed at me. Not in a mean way, but still. “Think of it this way,” she said. “You’re buying dolls for a deprived little girl who has never really had a doll of her own.”

“I’m not—I—” I wanted to stomp my feet and pout, but that would surely have caused Mom to laugh at me again. Because the absolute worst of it was—I did want a doll of my own.

“Let’s go over here,” Mom said suddenly, leading the way. Here was another toy aisle, perhaps a little more boy-oriented with Legos and Hot Wheels but at the far end were playsets and action figures.

Some great stuff. But my eyes went immediately to the lower racks where some toys on cards and in boxes had collected a bit of dust. And one of the cards showed an action figure version of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman.

“Mom,” I said, almost not breathing. I had a poster of her in my room in nearly the same pose as on the box. And the figure looked great with a cloud of black hair around her face.

“Here’s Princess Leia with Carrie Fisher’s face, and Lindsay Whosit as -uh- The Bionic Woman, and they even have Wonder Woman in her Diana Prince disguise.”

“Mom,” I said, taking a breath. These dolls were in the same scale as my GI Joes. Which also meant….

“I think they are all the same size as Barbie, so there’s lots of different clothes you could dress them in.”

“Mom!”

“You can pick two here and two from one of the other aisles, and a change of clothes for each doll,” Mom said.

Very reasonable for a blackmailer, I thought. “That’s going to be close to $20 for clothes and dolls. Uh, action figures,” I said.

She shrugged, looking pleased with herself that she had proved her point.

Wonder Woman’s costume was partly painted on, and the Bionic Woman had that funny arm that opened up to show it was mechanical so I picked Princess Leia and Diana Prince

“Don’t you already have one of Leia?” Mom asked.

I nodded. “But if we have different clothes for each of them, they can be sisters.”

Mom seemed to think that was funny for some reason.

Barbies are not action figures, and I couldn’t fool myself that they were anything but dolls. But I talked Mom into a playset, a scale model kitchen that was so incredibly cute! It even had a tiny box of Rice Krispies. Another $20 but Mom didn’t seem to mind and cooed over it like she was the one who would be playing with it.

I picked a Barbie that was wearing jeans and then three other sets of clothing for the three grown-up dolls. But my eyes lit on a Skipper doll, Barbie’s little sister. She was called Growing Up Skipper and, according to the package, when you turned her arm a certain way, she would get an inch taller and develop a bit of a figure. Small boobies, a lot like mine.

Okay, I had to get that. She came with two skirts that looked like they were made of tablecloth material so I picked out a set of denim overalls for her.

After that, we wandered around the store, got a bag of hot pecans from the nut cart and a cup of soda to share before taking the stuff we bought out to the car. The huge trunk on the Ford swallowed everything up and left me feeling a bit bereft when the lid closed on my new treasures.

That was when I knew I really was a girl because I so wanted to play with my dolls. Silly, but there it was.

I hiccuped, and Mom looked at me curiously. I didn’t want to cry, but I came very near to it. I swallowed hard and said, “Mom, I don’t know anything about how to be a girl.”

“You’re doing all right, honey,” she said.

She offered me the last sip of the Coke we had got, and I took the lid off to suck on some ice. The first week of September can be very hot in Southern California in the middle of an asphalt parking lot, but it was barely nine in the morning, so it was more the idea of how hot it was going to get than how hot it really was. Or maybe I just wanted something n my mouth to avoid talking.

“School,” I said around the ice. “Playground games.” I waved the cup, and she took it back.

“There’s some other things we could get here,” she said, heading back toward the store entrance.

“Wha—?” I hurried to catch up to her and almost swallowed the piece of ice.

“You’re saying you don’t know how to play the right jacks games or jump rope rhymes or how to talk double-dutch?”

“Uh? What’s double-dutch?”

“It’s like pig latin but harder for boys to figure out,” she said grinning. “You put extra syllables in the middle of words. It was a big thing when I was your age.” She snorted, remembering something. “You get on a roll with it, and sometimes you can’t figure out what you said yourself.”

I giggled.

“Weblee arblar gobling tobloo byblai yubloo suhblum bublooks,” she said.

“I—What?” I stopped, staring at her.

“You’ll get the hang of it, it just takes practice.” She kept moving, stepping on the mat for the automatic door.

“What the heck did you say, Mom?” I hurried to catch up again. “Mom?” I got the giggles again. I had sort of understood her.

We went straight to the magazines and books, and she started picking things out. Tiger Beat magazine I sort of could have predicted. I rolled my eyes, but it went in the pile. A couple of the 50-cent Nancy Drew mystery books. Okay. But some of the other books and magazines seemed off.

“Some of these are too young for you,” Mom said. “But girls your age will all have read them when they were younger, so you should too.”

That kind of made sense. I threw in a couple of choices myself, things I had seen girls reading.

We were getting quite a pile. “Are we spending too much money?” I asked.

Mom sniffed. “Wait till we get to Nordstrom’s.” She stopped what she was doing and put an arm around me. “Honey, six weeks ago we thought we were going to lose you to that fever. Mr. Fordyce’s insurance covered most of the medical bills, and we’re willing to spend what it takes to—to make up to you that we didn’t know who you were.” She had a catch in her voice.

I didn’t squirm out of her hug even though I wanted to. “I love you, Mom,” I said and hugged her back.

We took our new purchases up to the counter, and the check-out lady smiled at me. “Is it someone’s birthday?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, ma’am.”

Mom put in. “She was sick and missed her birthday.”

Several of the store people beamed at me. “Well, happy birthday, better late than never,” the cashier said, laughing. “You got those toys and now books! You’re going to be a happy, busy young lady for a while.”

Being called ‘she’ and ‘young lady’ still made me want to squirm, but I smiled and nodded and said thank you again when she handed me one of the bags.

“Spoil’em when they’re young,” she said as she handed the other bag over to Mom. Then to me, “Your hair is cute but so short!”

“Thank you. They had to cut my hair when I was sick,” I said. “My aunt gave me this new style.”

“Well, she did a good job, honey,” said the lady and the next woman in line nodded and smiled at me, too.

I felt good as we went out to the car. Everyone had been so nice to me, not actually what one would expect in Kmart.

Mom was sniffling as we got to the car. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked, realizing that she had been crying.

“You’re just so beautiful, honey,” she said.

Oh, Jeez! I know I turned red as a stop sign.

Mom leaned on the car for a moment, and I put our bags onto the lid of the trunk. I hugged her around the middle, and she kissed me just above my ear.

“We almost lost you,” she said, repeating something she had said inside. “You ran a fever of 104°, you could have died, or been blinded, or had brain damage. But we got you back, and because of all the medical tests they did, we found out something.”

“Uh,” I said. I tried to get away, but not too hard. I was afraid she was going to muss my hair. “That I’m a girl?” I said.

“And that we love you, so much, honey. So much,” and she kissed me on the forehead.

She held me away from her. “Spoil’em while they’re young, the lady said. Is there anything else you want, just for yourself, before we hit the road again. We’re going to get you lots of pretty clothes at Nordstrom’s—don’t make that face!—but is there anything here at Kmart you would want?”

“Uh….” Something did occur to me. I fingered my bracelet. “Some… some cheap jewelry? Maybe?” Something else occurred to me. “Uh, you said just for myself? But could we maybe get something for Moose and Junior? I know Moose might want a new Dodger cap, his old one got eaten by a steer.”

Mom laughed, which is why I said that about the cap getting eaten. “Sure,” she agreed. “But the Dodger’s are toast this season. We’ll get all the guys Angel caps so they can root for a winning team.”

We put the books and magazines in the car, not the trunk this time so I could read them while we drove up to Riverside. Then we went back inside.

We got the Angel caps for the guys and some jewelry for me. Mom got herself a new Angel cap this time, a pink one. She offered to get one for me, but I said, no, it would mess up my hair.

So I got a sun visor instead, just the bill with the Angel logo and a strap to go around my head. It was pink, too. I guess I’m over that hating pink thing.