A Fixed Luminous Point

 by Cassie Mannes Murray

Honorable Mention, 2019 Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize
selected by Tyrese L. Coleman

One month before Wendy pussyfoots into the velour night sky, she dreams of the slipperiness of wishes. When Wendy escapes out her window into the night and towards the empty plate of a full moon, the usual reaction is a sigh of relief. JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, has already told us all children must grow up and that age two is the end of the road for blissful childhood ignorance. The rest, bullshit. Before that, all giggles. In between giggles and bullshit is one small island with flamingos, lost boys, rich cake, a mermaid lagoon, houses handsewn from flutters of palm fronds, and nightlights that blink in a slow yawn underneath sheet tents. Where does girlhood fall in this—and womanhood? After the island washes away into adulthood, it’s all death from there.

Night after night, Peter Pan leaves his muddy prints on the windowsills, stands in hero-boy fashion with two fists at his hips and a face that looks out into the silverwear of stars. All of it feels real, but quite left of center so that the flamingos fly even in unfavorable tailwinds, the wolves make pets to lonesome girls filled to the brink on childhood stargazing, and one lamplight in particular flits around, her hips like a pin-up girl, looking for an unmistakable shadow. In the story, there is Wendy in her cotton nightdress finally facing down adventure, her hand clasped to that boy-thief, on the road to Neverland which was never a road, just a figment. It’s a wonder that when Mrs. Darling is tidying up the children’s minds: stowing certain memories of canoe oars, balance beams and pirates, while letting the laundry wash away other oddities like gnomes that are mostly tailors, and hangings that are mostly death, she doesn’t happen upon the boy’s shadow, nor his first teeth.

*

Sometimes I think my mom grew up in the shadow of who she could have been if she was middle class. Is this causal assertion of cash, class, and character even fair? I’ll put it this way: there are eight moon phases, each a percentage of light, a hangnail or a saucer sliding daylight or darkness over earth’s terrain, my mom would be the sliver, the waning crescent. What might be leftover when life gives you a shit hand. None of this is fantasy. It takes 27 days, 7 hours, and 43 minutes for our moon, the thing that controls all slow trilling tide, to complete a cycle. In that time my mom could have listened to her favorite Dolly song, “Jolene,” 243 times. I wonder if she loves Dolly so much because they grew up in similar fashions: poverty, big families, children who fill a certain emptiness with adventure and dreaming.

Dolly Parton is a crossbreed of girl-next-door and Penthouse. Between the made-up spectrum of church solo and Saturday morning cartoon. She’s been married to one man for over fifty years, but in her autobiography, My Life and Other Unfinished Business says it’s “hard for her to love a little, have sex a little, and eat a little.” Fitting perfectly into the expected southern paradox of sexy and pure. If Neverland existed, she would surely live there. If described in moon phases she would be the full moon. In her most familiar world, the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, there’s eternal damnation for sinners, a few instances of snake-handling fundamentalism, and enough room for her to pose in a beehive hairdo and Daisy Dukes as a “hillbilly hood ornament.” She is all that: a mythical creature, living at the in-between of southern “bless your heart” and sequined Playboy bunny. There is no before or after with Dolly Parton, she has always been an anomaly. But to believe this version of Dolly, we have to believe the version that came first.

I still wonder how much Dolly Parton she was when her family of twelve shared a small cabin, one outhouse. In an interview she said, “We had two rooms and a path, and running water, if you were willing to run to get it.” How many shadows did Dolly live under until it was just her in the glare of a stage spotlight? In winter her family kept a stockpot in the closet because it was too cold to walk out back to use the bathroom. Broken washing machine on the porch, rusted automobile parts in the yard, a roof wooden and overgrown by vine, newsprint wallpaper for insulation. If a person’s life is broken up into phrases—fractures of memory—how big is the black hole between “sweet-starved group of young’en’s” and “Lifetime Achievement Award.” This is what her star power is made of, this is how loud her star sings in the vacuum of night.

Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything,  they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was. So the older ones have become glassy-eyed and seldom speak (winking is the star language), but the little ones still wonder.

JM Barrie could be describing girls. I understand Wendy was the first of her name. JM Barrie invented the name, and therefore the girl—just for the book. Likewise, there was no Dolly before Dolly. She’s the first of her kind to land square between caricature and genius. Not only was Wendy mostly free of former selves when Pan spied her from behind the window latch, but she was free of reference. I could never be. I am Cassandra because it sounds good in a boardroom—could have been Sandy because my Mom loved Grease so much, but my brother suggested Cassie for short, Cass most of the time. He named me knowing I would build selves that grew up with two parents, one more than him, a home with a mortgage, not a landlord, and a lifestyle above minimum wage. A foundation. In the math tests of life, my fractions were larger.

Before they named me, none of them knew the Greek myth except maybe my teenage brother. Cassandra, the woman who spread prophecy no one believed. Didn’t Apollo have enough damsels twisting their hair on a lonely finger? Wasn’t it enough that he wore golden sandals against god-studded sky? Apollo kept her young and tongue-tied. A snake flicking his tongue into the sea of her ear. In this way, I’m not only the girl that came before me, but the women who were girls once too: in literature, in media, in my family tree. Dolly had a sister named Cassie who she says could have easily been the star if she had gotten there first. I wonder about this all the time. What are we connected with that we have no control over? Because Peter only knows women as mothers, Wendy is destined for just that.

I have no idea what it means to be a woman because everytime I imagine myself, I’m still a girl. Today, I have reached that slightly off-kilter age of thirty which by all accounts is adulthood and results in a fixed shape; maturity and a certain worth, but when I look in the mirror, I see every previous self, all those shadows snapping their fingers asking for elaboration on what if’s and tall tales. I can’t seem to find a way to acknowledge me now. This woman in the mirror. Maybe we don’t really know who we are in the time that we’re living it, maybe only after do we decide who we once were. Maybe then we can label it. Name it. I wonder sometimes if people can point to the instant that they went from girlhood to womanhood. Society tries to point us towards rites of passage: periods, passing, hormones, marriage, children. My mom likes to say, “pull your big girl panties up” but that didn’t start until I was in my own house, suddenly separate from her in almost every way but blood. But what if I don’t want to be her—me? Which one of my shadow selves got me to this point? Is there a direct line between certain previous selves and now selves that I’m unable to trace? If I lost the shadow that got to watch her become me, do I lose my whole history too?

*

Beatrice Shealy, my mom, grew up with her uncles in Leesville, Georgia, her aunts in Gainesville, Florida and her nuclear family in Eden, New York, a town with one stoplight and a corn queen. Eden is still nestled outside of one of the biggest tourist attractions in the US, Niagara Falls. Everyone older than nineteen in her family had at least two kids already, had entered “the service” and spent their lives earning pensions from the Ford plant on their return. That is, if they were men. Women in my family stayed home. My mom is not a rarity: a baby boomer, blue collar, poor.

When she speaks of her childhood, everything is nostalgia. There she is making mud cakes in her very first party dress and having to walk into a barbecue with barrettes drooping from her curls, her only pair of shoes for the year dried over with mud. When her parents had two payments left on the double-decker trailer they were renting to own, my grandfather wagered all his money in a late night poker game. That summer, my mom lived at her Aunt Adeline’s. Until she’s describing the trailer to me on the phone, she doesn’t realize that they were evicted after that poker game. They lost everything except their pajamas, including the repossessed car, my grandmother’s salt & pepper collection, anything in drawers. For the first time, my mom traveled out of state to stay with her aunts. That summer and for the rest of her childhood, her three sisters slept together in a double-bed trading back rubs. She was born poor just ten years after Dolly Parton.

The Parton girls are blonde with big heads, their bodies just reeds, backyard switches. They might always be under thirteen, wearing the same pair of shoes all year, drinking watered down bowls of stone soup. There are twelve mouths to feed in her family. It’s always a question of what these girls will grow into, what with rumors and gossip and the long walk it takes to get to school where anything can happen. Dolly claims she has boobs by age ten. She goes to school in a one-room schoolhouse time-managed by a sundial. All of them lack table manners, lack politeness, but know the word ma’am which opens like a frog in their mouth. Her mom Avie Lee is industrious; she can make a cowboy dinner from one dirty potato and the butcher’s unsellable bits.

Dolly fantasizes about sleeping with Johnny Cash as a teenager, and fly like eagles out among the stars. Most of her songs are written to the beat of a dashboard and although she and her Uncle Bill travel back and forth to Nashville on weekends, her uncle stealing money from his wife’s pocketbook, the big break is slow to come. Her living siblings are musical too, but everyone in church wants Dolly at the lectern. She spends her afternoons singing in an empty tobacco barn by herself, calls it a cathedral. In every interview she says she owes her voice to God, her talent beyond her control. Her dad hardly enters church, and I wonder if he can’t read along with the passages. Her dad, like my mom’s dad, only finished second grade. I don’t know if Dolly’s right when she says, “The worst thing about poverty is not the actual living of it, but the shame of it.” I believe her.

*

When Peter arrives for Wendy and her brothers, his hands are still sticky with fairydust. Tinkerbell hasn’t yet found his shadow although he sent her early and promptly. Her annoyance still sounds like the spritz of tiny bells. It wakes Wendy. Peter leads a curt conversation with Wendy that guides him, for the first time, to realize where he’s lacking. His name is awfully short, it is funny that he doesn’t ever receive any letters, and although he has no mother, he is not crying over it. Stardust sticks to his honeysuckle sweat, but his shadow does not. And it is certainly something to cry over, even when in all other circumstances Peter is free: nothing is hanging over him, nothing is fastened to him like a clothesline, nothing is following along behind (other than Tink). I wonder if this is because he’s a boy—able to leave those previous selves behind, bounce between and then past boyhood into manhood, evolve. He isn’t stuck in the shadow of babies, of love, of laws, of history, of a mother.

Does he even know death, really? At this point, because of his tears and incessant show, Wendy gets out her “housewife sewing bag” and tries to reattach his shadow. It doesn’t work and she jokes about trying ironing. Just after this, she offers to kiss him. Where did she learn this? A synonym of woman is offering. Yet Peter already has Tink. Named not because of the way her voice sounds: a pocket jingled with keys and lost change, but because she mends the pots and pans. Tink as in tin worker. A servant, not free. A woman with wings, but relegated to a kitchen. Without much magic, Peter convinces Wendy to come tell stories to the lost boys. Tink is angry Wendy gets to come; feet kicking the whole way. The story Peter most wants Wendy to tell is Cinderella.

Dolly describes her life as “rags to riches,” over and over. My mom would say the same. Eventually, my mom’s family moved out to Eden when she was eight. After the double-decker trailer fiasco and once her dad won back her mom with his sober sweetness. She describes it like this, “That’s, ya know, you’re growing up years, high school. That was a farmhouse, an old farmhouse, kind of house. You would have loved it. It had a Florida room. We just called it an old porch. There was a big garage / barn and a farmer field behind us. We tipped cows for fun.” Later, my dad will tell me he has no doubt she would move back there tomorrow. She is still so connected to that former self. A girl in a landscape rich with possibility. And she wants to bring me there; she’s willing to bring me there.

She says, “There were three acres. My dad planted a big, big garden in the back. And my mother canned. Before that I don’t remember ever canning. Suddenly there were canned pickles and canned jelly and canned okra. That was small though too. There was one bathroom. Me, Kathy, and Johnny still lived in the house. Hank and Gary had left for the service at seventeen and married off. Eva had married. It had two bedrooms and a little room off the kitchen that wasn’t really a bedroom, but they made it into a bedroom for Johnny. Me and Kathy shared a room. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was home. I liked it.” When I move into my first house, a check-mark into adulthood, I tell my parents I need land, somewhere I can’t see clear to the neighbor’s yard—a distance. I should have known then that shadow selves are a thing passed down, just like albums, facial expressions, money. My childhood selves aren’t the only ones counting on me.

*

In a Rolling Stone interview with Dolly, Chet Flippo, a childhood friend says her songs are sometimes, “her Gothic children’s tales, about a little girl and her dog who run away from a wayward mother and drunken father and show up at the narrator’s house to escape the bitter cold. During their sleep, ‘the angels take them both to heaven.’ That’s a common thread in many of her songs: unhappy kids dying off left and right and going on to glory. Dolly did not have a happy childhood and she seems destined to continually rewrite it.” Nobody dies in my mom’s story, but the fantasy place exists: Neverland, beyond this. And I wonder if this is the power of women, to live in the inbetween: not quite one thing or the other, never quite girl or woman, but storytellers, people who were made to dwell in daydream.

Across the Mysterious River and following the arrows, Wendy arrives in Neverland by being shot down on Tink’s command. She falls like a meteor to the ground. Tootles, one of the smallest of the lost boys says, “When ladies used to come to me in dreams, I said, ‘Pretty mother, pretty mother.’ But when at last she really came, I shot her.” Quickly, they learn from Peter that she is a mother-lady and that his single button—which he gave to her in her bedroom—has kept her alive. (Of course).

Asking for forgiveness, the boys build a house around her where she’s meant to stay. “The cooking, kept her nose to the pot” and she lingers underground for many weeks at a time. She learns that Hook is “the only man to whom barbecue was afraid.” Her brothers learn to serve under Peter, but Wendy does not leave the underground house. Some of Peter’s boys remember the days before they were lost, most live in the present. Wendy in these moments is both girl and woman. The lost boys have the same expectations for both. Even when Wendy wants to be kissed, seen as more than a mother figure, the boys can’t envision it. They can envision every fairytale though—where women are either dead or married. What of Tink then? Allowed to be neither girl or woman, but creature, fluttering wings. Tootles is convinced that his mother must have been very much like Cinderella in the stories Wendy tells. Cinderella might never return to her childhood, but she will always be partly made of its dark ash.

Hook spends many moons trying to find the lost boys’ home. And eventually he does, the boys are captured along with Wendy and there is a single line about Wendy being “entranced” by the pirate. The narrator even says he’s, “giving her [secret] away.” Maybe she has spent enough time wanting Peter to be more than a boy with just a legend behind his name. Society says, “girls mature faster than boys,” but maybe it’s just because people give boys the time they need to become men. Meanwhile, is there ever a line between girlhood and womanhood or are we always expected to be both at once?

Many years later in Spring, Peter drops in on the floor of Wendy’s old nursery. Just after she tucks her children in, he says, “Hullo,” as if no time has passed. He is exactly the same, down to the first teeth. When Wendy sees him, she cowers to the floor. “Something inside her was crying ‘Woman, Woman, let go of me.” Willingly she could give it all up even just for a second, to go back to girlhood. Her language changes too from whimsical to saying his name at the end of every sentence, the way a Mom would. She tells him not to waste the fairydust on her. She has moved beyond girlhood into womanhood, but all Peter sees is young Wendy. I wonder if her response is a flash of all the shadow girls that came before her, the huddle of them—a spill on the floor.

Dolly is famous for saying, “‘If I see something saggin’, baggin’, or draggin’, I’m gone have it nipped, tucked, or sucked!” She’s unafraid of wanting to travel backwards or to sameness. Her selves aren’t spilled but tightened. She’s busy finding them in the clefts and dips of her own skin. In a 1978, news article by Tom Zito in the Washington Post titled just “Dolly,” he opens with, “Dolly, indeed. ‘I’m no Farrah Fawcett,’ says Dolly Parton, her blond hair cascading over her shoulders, her red, red lips grinning wide, her impressive chest heaving.” Born in 1946, Dolly was thirty-two years old. Tom Zito, a grown man at that point, describes her body like she’s a replica of her Playboy cover. He goes on to say, “That’s Dolly’s dolly exterior. Inside there’s this tough business manner all mixed up with childlike sincerity.” It’s hard to tell in his descriptions if he respects her. Later in the article he asks Dolly about her appearance on the cover of Playboy magazine, she says, “They made pictures of me in a little bunny outfit for the cover of the October Playboy and I just thought it was a real cute idea.” His response, “Real cute. She says it like she could still be in high school, just waiting for some guy to call up and ask for a Saturday night date, and she’d pick up the phone, and pause for a long time while her huge eyelashes batted—and at exactly the right time she’d say, ‘Yes, that’d be real cute.”

In the entire interview Zito refers to Dolly as the girl and as the woman —not a separate landscape, but a whole one. That shadow of the girl she once was still in the woman who is speaking to Zito. Dolly plays this up in a lot of her interviews. Her signature giggle pulling like a light clicked on and off, on and off. Sometimes she blushes. I can’t tell if it’s the persona or the actual Dolly, if she’s nervous or finds the interviewer funny. People let her be both because we know there are two people: the performer and the person. In this way she can defy and move into stereotypes. Why doesn’t every woman get access to this paradigm? I wonder if my mom smushed her selves to please the boy who knocked her up at fifteen: if she contorted her face, the sound of a laugh, to fit his expectations.

When my mom was fifteen she was valedictorian of her class. She knew shorthand but not cake decorating, had a best friend, who had a brother, who became her boyfriend. He was a mechanic, sort of, a high schooler, sort of, and a man, sort of. Her life was smudged out with motor oil. “But what did anyone expect?” Her sisters would say. “The only way to get out of what we currently had is with a man.” I want to reach into the past and give her more than that, give me more than that.

I can’t go anywhere without all my shadow selves crowding in, and now my mom’s. Britney Spears comes on the radio and I’m back to Halloween my freshman year of high school when I dressed as her in her single, “Baby One More Time.” I had pink puffs around pigtails so high only boys my age could reach to blow their feather fluff. She is the Dolly Parton of my childhood: pop star, infamous, rumored, always a girl/thing and never a woman. She’s even babied in the press. Dolly Parton herself in People Magazine says, “Poor little Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. If those little girls slept with as many men as they say in the tabloids, why their little butts would have more fingerprints than the FBI! I kinda feel sorry for them. We should give those two a break.” But they don’t get one. And probably neither will I. I wonder if women are holding themselves back from it. Is that even a fair question with everything within us—against us? Trying to retain a bit of those previous selves, a bit of childhood always. What does it add to stardom?

How did my mom feel that night, letting her school girl daughter carry pillowcases for candy around a neighborhood—with three other girls dressed in rags on purpose—and three boys that would most certainly push us up against pine trees near the creek by our house. Sometimes adventure also looks like darkness. How then when I wasn’t yet fifteen, six months shy, was she unable to think of her belly rounding like a new moon at the first sight of him? Her shadow selves—maybe not all of them—blinking at the would be’s.

My mom is the product of parallel time, a million what if’s. All women are. Imagine: my mom never runs through flashcards with me at the kitchen table or unfolds my notes from boys stuck in the dryer’s lint pile. She doesn’t marry my dad, he doesn’t slip his own notes underneath her windshield wiper, into the back pocket of her khakis stained from rubbing icing off her hands onto her thighs. Her boss isn’t trying to take her on a date. She never moves to 5 Marlow hoping the boy who got her pregnant will stop sleeping with other women. She doesn’t fix the baseboards of that little house on her knees while that boy flirts with the neighbor. Michael, my brother, never rides down the road on a thrift store off-brand Green Machine. Her belly unrounds, empty of my him. The windows unwindex from the sweep of her washrag. My brother’s fingerprints nowhere to be found. The boy who convinced her to have sex just once—maybe he said what they all say, “just the tip,—disappears. She stays Valedictorian; she takes calculus like her schedule mandated. What woman would she be? If we lose all those past lives, what future lives go with them? My mom says to me on the phone all the time, “I’d have to do it all over again because without it, I wouldn’t have your brother, I wouldn’t have you.” Her shadow selves with flushed cheeks—knowing. I never knew her as a girl, but if I know myself enough, I can get to her.

Cassie Mannes Murray is an Assistant Agent at Howland Literary, while earning her MFA at UNCW in Creative Nonfiction, and currently designs for  Ecotone and Lookout Books. At  Raleigh Review , she is the Book Review Editor, and Social Media Coordinator. She has been supported by Kenyon Writers Workshop, and the Shannon Morton Fellowship. Her essays have appeared in The Rumpus. She is working on a lyric essay collection featuring moths, slipping away, girlhood, and the South.