Something Wild

by Hanna Halperin

  The server shrugged. “Don’t be,” he said, and when he looked at her his eyes and his half smile were so soft that Nessa felt light-headed. “Hey, do you want a drink?” he asked. “I can sneak one out here for you, no problem.”

  Nessa laughed, shocked. “That’s okay,” she said quickly, and immediately she regretted saying no.

  He smiled. “I should get back.” He nodded toward the house.

  “Okay.”

  “See you around?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “See you.”

  Nessa watched as he walked away, one hand in his pocket and the other dangling by his side, his fingers tapping something out on his leg. Halfway across the lawn he stopped and turned around. “Hey!” he called out, and he pointed right at her. “Careful. Those things will give you cancer.” Then he grinned, and her entire body exploded with happiness.

  She waited until he disappeared into the house before she dropped her cigarette on the ground. She stamped it out with the toe of her shoe, just like he had, and headed back into the party with a new, unexpected kind of armor.

  The Bennington bed-and-breakfast won’t allow dogs, but it turns out the place across the street, the Paradise Motel, will. Nessa is relieved to be sitting in the backseat with Sally’s head nestled in her lap, and not up front with Tanya and her mother, where the tension is sharp, practically pungent.

  When the texts start up, first it’s just a few chirps from Lorraine’s phone, but soon there are dozens coming in, another one every few minutes, each one shriller and more urgent sounding than the last.

  “What’s he saying?” Tanya asks.

  Lorraine doesn’t answer.

  “Don’t write back,” Tanya says. “Better yet, block him.”

  Lorraine just stares out the window.

  At some point, either Jesse stops texting or Lorraine puts her phone on silent, and the car goes quiet. When they cross the Massachusetts border into Vermont, the roads out in the country are darker, windier. The mountains appear, but in the night, they’re just murky shapes—ink-black mounds against a wool-black sky.

  Nessa had always associated those mountains with the boyfriend in Bennington. She’d convinced herself they were in love, that when he sang Neil Young songs on his guitar, he’d been singing about her. And that when he forgot to pick her up at the bus station, or he was an hour late, or he showed up stoned or drunk, they were all honest mistakes.

  Now, seeing the mountains, she feels a sharp pang of heartache. It’s not for him, and it’s not for Henry, or even for her mother, who seems unable to stop glancing down at her phone. It’s just a feeling that begins in Nessa’s chest and rises all the way up to her throat. And then—just like that—it passes.

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME they pull up to the motel, it’s almost ten. There’s a sign out front by the road, lit up: vacancies, complimentary breakfast, pets allowed, wifi.

  There are hardly any other cars parked outside the motel, and Nessa doesn’t know if this makes her feel more safe or less.

  In the lobby, a silver bell sits on the desk with a handwritten note: Please ring for assistance! Tanya rings the bell and moments later a young woman stumbles out of a door. She blinks at the light and pushes her hair back from her eyes.

  “Good evening,” she says huskily. Her name tag reads Erica.

  “We’d like a room for three, please,” Tanya says.

  The woman yawns and fiddles with the mouse, rousing a very old computer to life. “Three, three, three,” she mutters. Nessa glances around. The lobby is homey and poorly decorated, like a grandmother’s living room filled with thrift-store clutter. The sofas are dated, not matching, though they look comfortable. There’s a wooden coffee table with stacks of the Vermont local papers and a pot of fake flowers. A large-screen TV is playing the Weather Channel in the far corner of the room. The ceilings are low, the lighting a mixture of fluorescent ceiling lights and warm, yellow floor lamps. Deep purple curtains hang in the windows. The peculiarity of the place is calming. No one will find them here.

  “Any pets?”

  “One.”

  Erica glances over the desk and smiles at Sally, who is sitting at Nessa’s feet. “Cutie.” She looks back at Tanya. “Smoking or nonsmoking?”

  Tanya glances at Lorraine. “Smoking,” she says. Tanya’s way of being warm.

  “Alright. I have one room with two double beds or one with a queen-sized and we could pull in a cot.”

  “Two doubles is fine.” Tanya opens her purse, and Lorraine puts her hand on Tanya’s wrist. “Honey, let me.”

  “Don’t you and Jesse share a bank account?”

  Lorraine drops her arm and then nods. “Shit.”

  “Don’t worry,” Tanya says. “Better safe than sorry.”

  Nessa glances at Erica, but the woman hides any reaction or curiosity she might have and Nessa wonders how often people show up at this little motel in the mountains to hide.

  Tanya hands Erica her credit card and in exchange Erica gives them three plastic swipe keys. “You’re in room 164,” she says. “Right down that hallway there. There’s breakfast in the morning.”

  * * *

  —

  THEY WAKE UP hungry and leave Sally in the room to find the breakfast lounge, then watch while Erica rolls in a cart of food and arranges everything on a long card table beneath a checkered tablecloth. “Enjoy,” she says, after all the food is spread out. She gives them a little wave before disappearing.

  They survey the spread: mini boxes of cereal, pastries, small doughy bagels, oatmeal, yogurt with berries and granola, Vermont-made honey and syrup. They take some of everything and fill mugs with coffee, bring it all back to their table. They’re quiet at first, eating as though they haven’t eaten for days.

  After the initial burst of hunger is satiated, they slow down, take stock of the accumulation of empty dishes. They sip from their mugs and dunk bits of pastry into the coffee.

  Tanya is the first one to push her plate away. She wraps one arm around her face, smelling the crease of her elbow, and lifts her arm, taking a whiff of her armpit. “I stink,” she announces. They haven’t showered since before going to court the morning before.

  This prompts Nessa and Lorraine to lift their arms, too.

  “It’s not a great situation over here either,” Nessa says.

  Tanya leans in, sticking her nose close to Nessa’s armpit. “Not as bad as mine.”

  “Girls!” Lorraine laughs, as Tanya offers her armpit to Nessa.

  “Ew, Tee.” Nessa yanks her head away from Tanya.

  “I get the clinical stuff and it still never lasts.”

  “Mom, you should smell it.”

  “I’m not going to smell it—”

  A couple walks in then and this makes all of them shut up. Tanya, whose arm is still raised, quickly drops it. She starts to laugh and this makes Nessa laugh, too. Lorraine puts both hands over her face and shakes her head.

  * * *

  —

  AFTER SHOWERS, LORRAINE falls back asleep immediately on one of the double beds and Tanya and Nessa share the other. For a while the sisters lie quietly, listening to Lorraine’s breath, monitoring the rise and fall of their mother’s chest.

  Then Nessa rolls over to face Tanya and they stare at one another the way they used to do when they were younger, when it seemed they were quite possibly thinking and feeling all the same things. At one time, it had seemed magical. The unexplainable mix of sounds and smells and colors and feelings that made up the Bloom girls. It was no longer that simple. They’d grown up with the same mother and the same father. They’d grown up sleeping an arm’s length apart from each other. But somehow, they’d still had entirely different childhoods.

  “Tanya,” Nessa says.

  “Hmm?”

  “Will y
ou give me a massage?”

  To Nessa’s surprise, Tanya nods. Nessa rolls over onto her stomach and Tanya climbs on top, straddling her. Nessa pulls off her T-shirt and brushes her hair off her neck.

  “Where does it hurt?” Tanya asks.

  “Everywhere. My shoulders.”

  Using her thumbs, Tanya kneads Nessa’s back, moving in circles around her shoulder blades. She finds the knots and works at them, applying slow, patient pressure.

  “Thank you,” Nessa says after several minutes. “Do you want one?”

  “Relax,” Tanya says, and she continues to rub Nessa’s neck. Nessa breathes deeply and closes her eyes.

  Tanya works thoughtfully down Nessa’s spine. It hurts in a good way, and Nessa feels herself melt into a different thing altogether—just a body, a puddle of sensations—muscles, bones, pressure points. Everything else evaporates. There’s pain and pleasure, and that’s it; everything on a spectrum.

  She misses Henry. She thinks how nice it will be, to go home to someone who will hold her.

  When tears come it’s neither happiness nor sadness. It’s just wet in Nessa’s eyes and when she blinks, wet on her cheeks.

  Tanya touches Nessa’s cheek but doesn’t say anything. She moves her fingers into Nessa’s hair and scratches lightly at her scalp, all the millions of little nerve endings sparking under her nails.

  2002

  At first Tanya thought it was shit. It was a brownish-copper color and in her underwear of all places. But it didn’t smell like shit and it wasn’t in the seat of her underwear. Alarmed, she pulled Nessa into the bathroom. “Look,” she said, pulling down her pants, showing her sister the stained mess.

  “Tee,” Nessa said, her eyes growing wide. “You got your period.”

  “But why is it that color?” Tanya asked.

  “Because the blood is dried. Oh my God. We have to tell Mom.”

  But Lorraine was downstairs with Jesse, and Tanya did not want to involve her mother’s boyfriend in this in any way. Tanya did not like any of her mother’s boyfriends, but Jesse was especially bad. It was something about the way he smiled at Tanya. Like he was trying to win her over, like he might be able to trick her if she relaxed too much.

  “No,” Tanya said. “Not now.” She turned toward the bathroom mirror and looked herself up and down. Her pants were still bunched at her knees. “I’m menstruating,” she announced, businesslike, to her reflection.

  Nessa giggled and tried to hug her, but Tanya ducked. “Don’t touch me, I’m ovulating!” she cried, this time in a slightly hysterical tone.

  “You’re going to need a pad.”

  “Fuck no.” Tanya shook her head. “I’m not wearing a diaper. I want to wear a tampon.” The word was ridiculous to say out loud.

  “You realize you have to stick it up your vagina, right?” Nessa asked.

  “I know.”

  “It took me, like, a year to figure out how to do it.”

  “Will you teach me?” Tanya asked.

  “Let’s go to Mom’s bathroom.”

  They migrated bathrooms and Nessa turned on the bright overhead lights, locked the door behind them, and rifled through the cabinet under the sink for the box of tampons. “We’re going to be needing more of these,” she said, glancing inside the box, and Tanya felt a flutter of excitement, along with a burst of pride, that she’d joined the ranks of tampon-wearing women in the house.

  “Okay,” Nessa said, handing Tanya an oblong-shaped package. “Here you go.”

  Tanya held it out in front of her. “What do I do with it?”

  “Open it, dummy.”

  Tanya opened it and examined the bulbous head of the tampon, the patch of cotton peeking out from behind pink plastic, the embarrassing string hanging down, making the whole thing look fishlike.

  Nessa discarded her own pajama pants so she was standing in her underwear. “So you want to stand like this . . .” She modeled. Her legs were widespread and she was bending her knees a little, like she was playing defense in a basketball game. “Then you just find the hole and slide it up there. When it’s in, you push the applicator thingy with your finger, then pull the plastic out.”

  “Okay.” Tanya removed her stained underwear so she was naked from the waist down. She stood in the defensive position, and, keeping her eyes on her sister, she probed around for “the hole” with the tip of the tampon. Once she felt an opening, she pushed. “It’s hitting up against something,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Some sort of wall.”

  “Try at a different angle.”

  Tanya readjusted the angle of the tampon and pushed, but the tampon wouldn’t budge. “I don’t think it’s the angle.”

  “Are you sure you’re putting it in the right hole?”

  “Isn’t there just one?”

  “Tee! Are you serious?”

  “What?” Tanya yanked the tampon away from herself, frightened suddenly by the idea of sticking a foreign object inside a hole she hadn’t known existed.

  “There’s more than one hole. You know you don’t pee and poop out of the same place, right?”

  “I’m not sticking the tampon up my butt, Nessa. I’m not an idiot.”

  “Well, did you know there’s a third hole?”

  “Yes, I know there’s a third hole,” Tanya said, looking away. She did not. “Will you just show me?”

  Nessa sighed. “Fine. But it’s not going to work very well on me because I’m not bleeding.”

  Nessa pulled down her own underwear and flicked them off her ankles.

  Her sister’s vagina looked different from Tanya’s; it always had. There was something more external about Nessa’s vagina. The inner lips were longer and peeked out—you could see the pleats and the folds, whereas Tanya’s were more hidden; shyer. Now her sister had pubic hair that covered a lot of it. Tanya had hair, too, but not as much as her sister—though Tanya knew more was coming.

  Nessa took a tampon from the box and then spread a towel down on the tiled floor. “I’m going to do it lying down,” she said, “so you can see where it goes, and then when it’s inside, how I push in the applicator.”

  Her sister lay down and spread her legs. Using one hand, Nessa opened the inner lips, exposing pink, shiny, hairless flesh. It was not how Tanya imagined a vagina to look up close. In fact, she’d never before imagined what her own vagina looked like up close. In her mind she’d always thought of it more as a surface than something multifaceted, with various textures and openings.

  “See the hole?” Nessa asked, pointing with her finger.

  “Yes,” Tanya said.

  “Okay, so you put it here . . .” Nessa slid the tampon inside, wincing a little.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not too bad. Okay, so once it’s here is when you push. See how I push with my finger and the cotton part goes up, but the plastic part comes out?”

  “Yeah, I see.”

  “And the string just hangs so when you want to take it out all you have to do is pull.” Nessa pulled. “Ow. Dry cotton.” She sat up.

  “I think I can do that,” Tanya said. She resumed the defense position and this time felt around with her fingers for the right hole. When she found it, she held the lips open like Nessa had, and prompted the tampon inside. “It’s going,” she said. Tanya moved her finger to the plastic applicator and pushed, and, to her surprise, the plastic came out, but the tampon stayed securely inside her. “Oh my God,” she whispered, looking up at Nessa. “It’s fucking inside me.”

  Nessa smiled. “Weird, right?”

  Tanya looked at herself in the mirror. The string hung between her legs and she pointed at it. “Nasty.” She did a little dance.

  “Just wait until the second day.”

  “What’s the second day?”

&nb
sp; “It’s like the worst bloody nose you’ve ever had, but it’s inside your vagina.”

  “Nessa,” Tanya said, laughing.

  Nessa began to laugh, too. “You’ll see what I mean when you pull the tampon out. It’s like a murder happened.”

  “I can’t wait,” Tanya said, and she meant it.

  * * *

  —

  LATER THAT NIGHT Lorraine came up to say good night. “Sweet dreams,” she said, sticking her head in the doorway.

  “Guess what I got today,” Tanya said, unable to keep the news from her mother any longer.

  “What?” Lorraine asked.

  “You have to guess.”

  “An A on your math test?”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s not what I was talking about.”

  Lorraine came into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of Tanya’s bed. Instinctively her mother reached for Ellie the Elephant, running her hands down the animal’s floppy ears. “Give me a hint.”

  “It’s red.”

  “A pimple?”

  “My period.”

  Lorraine put Ellie back down on the bed and a stern expression came over her mother’s face. “Tanya, are you serious?”

  “Yeah, earlier tonight.”

  For a moment Lorraine looked like she was going to burst out crying and then she lunged forward and pulled Tanya into an urgent hug. “Oh my God. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Mom, you’re pulling my hair.”

  “Sorry,” Lorraine said, sitting back a little. “Why didn’t you tell me, sweetheart?” She was smiling now, brushing Tanya’s hair off her forehead and tucking it behind her ear in quick, furious motions.

  Tanya couldn’t tell if her mother was happy or upset, or some combination of the two. She hadn’t been expecting a reaction like this. When Nessa had gotten her period, her mother had barely blinked. It had been no different, really, from when her sister had gotten braces.

  “My baby got her period,” Lorraine said, still stroking Tanya’s hair. “Want me to show you where the pads are?”