Box Girl by Lilibet Snellings

Author:Lilibet Snellings [Snellings, Lilibet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023628
Publisher: Soft Skull Press

The Zoo

A guy in a plaid flannel shirt is waving his arms overhead, trying to get my attention. He must not know I’m not allowed to look at him. And that must, I imagine, make this whole charade even more intriguing. If you say, “Here, kitty, kitty,” and hold out your hand long enough, the animal at the zoo will at least give you a glance. She may even come over and growl, do something impressive. But I am contractually obligated to ignore you.

It’s a bit peculiar to think that, if I have children someday, I will have to tell them about this job. “Oh, like the zoo!” I can hear them saying.

“Yes,” I will be obliged to say. “Like the zoo.”

But they’ll already know all of this. They’ll be able to mine the Internet for all sorts of former versions of their mom. As a child, I used to love looking through my parents’ high school yearbooks. So involved in school activities, sports, and student government, my mom was on practically every page, smiling in her saddle shoes and Eton skirts. (As my Uncle George likes to say, she would have joined the “Tiddlywinks Club” if there were such a thing.) In my dad’s yearbook, he was voted a “Snow Man,” which he explained in the following way: “This was common slang in the sixties. A snowman was so ‘cool’ that he could produce ‘snow’ just by being himself. Girls in his vicinity were subject to being ‘snowed,’ a phenomenon that was often totally out of their control but generally not life-threatening. However, some young ladies who got thoroughly snowed often thought their life was over when the snowman did not embrace their infatuation.” This, of course, is just one man’s humble approximation of the phrase.

Sometimes, as a child, I’d find old photos in the backs of drawers or the bottoms of file cabinets. I kept one of my parents throwing a Frisbee in a park somewhere. My mom’s hair was cut into a shaggy brown bob and she was wearing a short red romper. My dad, who I have never known without gray hair, had thick, golden-brown hair, styled into muttonchops. But the muttonchops were actually the least shocking part of the picture for me. What I really couldn’t get over were his cut-offs. I have never in my life seen my dad out in public in anything other than pleated khaki pants. I have never seen him wear a single pair of jeans, let alone ones he took a pair of kitchen scissors to.

Other times I’d uncover a whole shoebox full of old photographs—the rounded-edge matte ones from the ’70s and ’80s—of my parents on a ski trip with friends, or at the beach. I loved seeing these versions of their former selves. While sometimes in the pictures it was pretty apparent that they were hammered drunk, that was about as scandalous as they got. Because, I’m sure, if there was photographic evidence of anything more illicit,

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