My bed creaked loudly if you so much as flipped from your right side to your left. We had a system. We’d grab all the dirty clothes from our laundry basket and toss them on the floor. On top of the clothes, we’d spread out a ratty old towel I’d gotten for free from a Dodgers game Dad took me to when I was nine. If we had trouble keeping quiet, there was a meaty part between neck and shoulder that didn’t hurt too bad if bitten; fingers could be sucked on too.
We quickly threw down the clothes, the blanket, ourselves on top of it. Billy sneezed twice into my mouth. An old gym sock got tangled in my hair. He told me that he loved the smell of my new perfume. I told him I wasn’t wearing perfume, just Speed Stick. We laughed and made marks on each other’s bodies, wet red spots that even after they dried would still shine for days afterward, make us smile whenever we saw them reflected back in mirrors and windows, little red beacons that screamed to whoever stared at them, “Hey, hi, hello, howdy, look at me, I am alive and loved.” Billy pushed inside of me and I moaned against his neck, made the first red mark above his collarbone.
I was enjoying myself and feeling grateful for that fact. I was lucky and I knew it. He came quickly, before I could, and I didn’t mind. I kind of preferred it, actually—feeling him pull out and fall onto his back, knowing that I made him feel good, happy we could just lie there now, no talking, the only sounds his satisfied panting, the whirring of our two fans, the TV from downstairs, either the news or a game show—Mom liked both.
Billy being Billy, the silence didn’t last long.
“You didn’t? Did you?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s okay.”
Billy, also being Billy, hated when he came and I didn’t. To him it was unfair, unjust, his world would remain unbalanced until I had also had an orgasm of equal, toe-curling magnitude. He ignored my assurances that everything was all good, really, and hopped back on top of me, started kissing my neck and moving lower and lower. He did have a nice tongue, used the right amount of teeth and suction. I ran my hands up and down the sides of his face and each time I got to his ears, I thought about wrapping my fingers around them and yanking him back to my eye level, grabbing his chin, and telling him to fucking stop.
It wasn’t that I had trouble saying no. It was just that sometimes saying no wouldn’t solve anything and would lead to longer conversations, ones that I wasn’t prepared to have.
Like, if I told Billy, “No, please stop,” I would also have to tell him that lately I’d been having trouble orgasming. And if I told him that, then he’d ask with deep, aching sincerity, “Interesting, why do you think you are unable to reach orgasm?” And to answer that question I’d have to breathe and speak words that were painful even to think.
Usually, I’d masturbate every morning in the shower or in those quiet sections of the day when no one was home and books and music and TV and eating and sweating and pacing up and down the stairs and everything else that filled my time at home, all of it, seemed dull. However, the past few weeks, each time I tried, the minutes would just stack on top of each other until I was so frustrated that I’d hop out of the shower or roll off my bed, body tight, fists clenched and ready to hit something.
We’d had sex more times than I could count, and I didn’t have any idea what I used to think about during. I should’ve written it down somewhere word for word, on colorful note cards, yellow or pink, bright squares I could pull out whenever I needed release. It was too easy for my mind to wander. The smallest things would distract me. I’d be starting to feel good and then my eyes would focus on something, anything, and I would spiral.
An old orange peel peeking out of the trash can would make me wonder what I tasted like. Was it something distinct and nameable? If someone kissed me would they later tell their buddies how my lips were orangey? Probably not, it was probably something unfruity, how could you taste like anything unless you were constantly eating it? Best-case, I had burrito lips. My desk lamp would be on and it would make no sense to me—I rarely sat there anymore, hadn’t picked up a book since I don’t know when, there was no need for extra light. The one, two, three, four water glasses scattered on random surfaces around my room—one glass, I could’ve just used one. The sound of a car screeching to a halt outside, honking, angry voices, I knew it was because of that fucking palm tree—tall, an obnoxiously thick trunk, it blocked the stop sign in front of my house and caused near accidents all the time. My sheets were a pleasant shade of blue, but had been washed so many times that there were patches where the blue was less vibrant, there was no way to get the original color back. In the shower, I’d pick a water droplet on the wall, name it, and watch it plummet to its death. Closing my eyes didn’t help. I could conjure all sorts of images against the darkness of my lids.
I tugged lightly on Billy’s ears. I kept my gaze firmly on his forehead as he went down on me. Any higher, I risked seeing something that would distract me. Any lower, I could be in danger of making eye contact with him.
I started picturing myself in other places. I didn’t intend to, it just happened. I was watching the mole above Billy’s right eyebrow, closed my eyes for a moment, and then I was sitting cross-legged in the outfield of a baseball stadium. No time to see who was playing or winning—soon I was in the supermarket with Dad, slapping watermelons, trying to guess which was the sweetest. Next, my high school ceramics studio. Not creating any bowls or plates or mugs, just running the dark red clay through my fingers. I was still holding the clay when I looked up, found myself lying on a couch next to an empty bag of Hot Cheetos, a half-eaten salad, a tub of cream cheese. The floor was covered in old T-shirts. I was surrounded by seven chairs, seven shitty paintings. I threw the clay away, or maybe I wasn’t even holding it anymore—I wanted to see Jenny Hauser.
It wasn’t a sex fantasy. I didn’t picture her hands or mouth on me, although I won’t pretend those images disgusted me. I was just lying on her couch and wishing that the Hot Cheetos bag wasn’t empty, that a pillow was under my head, that she had a little music on, something with lyrics that made you think and hurt with a beat that made you want to dance. She walked into the room right as Billy started sucking on my clit.
“You like that?” Billy asked.
“Yes,” I said, pushing his head back down. “Don’t stop.”
Her ponytail was loose and low and her shirt was wrinkled, the same stain on its collar. She walked from painting to painting until, in front of the fifth one, the turtle she didn’t give to me, she collapsed.
I carried her back to the couch. I stroked her face, pushed away the loose strands of her hair, and tucked them behind her ears. When she opened her eyes, she smiled at me. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ve been on my feet all day.”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m really thirsty.”
A glass of water appeared in my left hand. I gave it to her. She drank the whole thing in one clean gulp.
“You’re wonderful,” Jenny said. “Do you believe me? You’re wonderful.”
She stared at me. I stared back.
“I believe you,” I said.
I came hard, grabbing Billy’s ears tight and pulling him into me. I squeezed my eyes shut, tried not to leave Jenny or the living room, but I couldn’t will myself back, only random spots and patterns of color would flash across the dark of my lids.
“Wow,” Billy said. He crawled out from between my legs and lay next to me, wrapped his arms around me. “That was incredible.”
“Yeah,” I said, patting his back. I wanted to get out of bed and run to Dad’s shed, turn the TV on mute, chug a beer, and spend the rest of the night masturbating with my eyes closed.
I didn’t get up, didn’t go to the shed, not until much later, and then only for twenty minutes, to sip half a beer and watch an infomercial about shower curtains that were also picture frames, Popsicles with tiny flecks of kale in them, other
necessary vitamins. I continued patting Billy’s back. My room’s ceiling was blank and white with no cracks. It was a good backdrop for me to project my thoughts and feelings onto and attempt to sort them into something resembling order and sense. “Incredible,” I said.
6
WE WERE LEGALLY REQUIRED to log a break each shift. Luckily, we weren’t legally required to eat the pizza during our break. Eddie’s pizza wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible. It was just hard to eat the same thing every day, no matter what it was.
There was a taco truck Darryl and I liked that sat in the gas station parking lot across the street. We’d go at least three times a week. The salsa and guac were a little watery, but free. We’d wrap up a few slices with various toppings and make a trade with the guy in the truck, whom we simply called Taco Man. He knew we called him that too. Once, in a show of goodwill, Darryl asked for his real name in bad middle-school Spanish, and he just smirked. “Taco Man is fine.” Five slices of pizza got us three tacos each. This total was decided on with zero discussion and no one ever complained.
Peter had hired a new guy the week before. His name was Willie and he was at least forty, had neon-green braces and an intense love of show tunes. A good worker and a genuinely nice person, he drove Darryl and me absolutely fucking nuts.
We wished we liked him more, we really did. However, some days, he was just too much. He’d be singing something from Guys and Dolls as he scraped gum off the bottoms of the tables, and Darryl would turn to me and clear his throat, twice. “So—how’s Granny Mavis doing?” My dad’s mom was dead and named Dorothy and my mom’s mom I’d never met and only knew by a string of Korean expletives. Granny Mavis was no one, a code for “Willie is fucking killing me, and if we don’t get the fuck out of here I’ll fucking kill him—I’m fucking hungry.” “Granny is good,” I would say. “Her diaper just needs to be changed a lot.”
Darryl would get different kinds of tacos each time. I only ever got the al pastor. Since I didn’t get it every day, each bite was always perfect. We’d lean against the gas pumps and scarf them down like starving rats.
“We should be nicer to Willie,” I said, sucking the grease off my thumb. “I hate how he looks whenever we go to lunch together. We at least have to bring him something back.”
“I know, I know.” Darryl pulled out a plastic water bottle of liquid I didn’t question. He took a long swig. “He just makes me think of high school.”
“What? You weren’t popular in high school?”
“I was a fat black faggot in band,” he snorted. “What do you think?”
I wiped my lips on a napkin. “I didn’t know you played an instrument.”
“Yup. Trumpet.”
I started pulling at the napkin’s edges. “So,” I said, “you knew you were gay back then.”
“Yeah, I tried not to think much about it. Looking back, though, it was obvious.”
“How was it obvious?”
“It’s hard to explain.” Darryl began crumpling his napkin, making it a tight round ball. “I found and still find girls attractive, but only boys can ruin my life.”
I wanted to ask him for a pull from his water bottle. I watched a loose drop move down the side and nearly leaned over and licked it up. “I had this girlfriend back then,” Darryl continued. “Sweet girl, Maggie Tyler. I mentioned once that apples were my favorite fruit, and the next day she showed up at my locker with a paper bag full of the biggest, juiciest McIntoshes I’d ever seen. And she didn’t work at the grocery store or nothing. She bought me those with her own money. My mom liked her too, especially that she was a tiny, pretty white girl.”
“But?”
He laughed. “But, the entire time she was bringing me bags of apples and charming my mom, I was filling notebooks with the name of the boy who sat next to me in woodshop.”
“What was his name?”
“Jeremy Durant. He had a chin dimple and the smoothest hands. Made these beautiful oak steps so that his little dog, a Frenchie named Beyoncé, could get onto his bed all by herself.”
“Wow, now I have a crush on him.”
“Don’t.” He sighed, threw the napkin on the ground. “Once I filled a couple notebooks, I convinced myself that he felt the same way and that I should tell him. Predictably, it went terribly, and he told the whole school that trumpets weren’t the only things that I blew. Maggie told my mom. I came home that day to them holding each other and sobbing. My main thought when I saw Maggie was ‘Damn, I’m going to have to buy my own apples now.’ ”
I picked up his napkin and threw it into the trash can. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He’s a fool and I still think he’s gay. Like, his dog’s name was Beyoncé.”
“But how did you know? Like, how did you even know Jeremy was someone you could like?”
“Why dudes? I don’t know. Nature, nurture, who the fuck knows. The outcome is the same.” He looked up toward the sky. I looked up with him. Pure blue, not a cloud in sight. “Why Jeremy? Another question with another answer I’m not sure of. It doesn’t seem like we get to choose who we like. I wish we could, it would all be a lot simpler if I could just decide to like someone. If I could, I’d choose Maggie Tyler every damn day. Everything would be easier, my chest wouldn’t feel like it does now, like there’s something rotting inside of it. I would have an apple with breakfast, lunch, dinner.”
He looked back down. I kept looking up. There was a plane in the sky and I was trying to guess how many people were inside it. I pictured every seat, every person, and I wondered about their names, ages, jobs, what they were listening to on their iPods, where they were coming from, who they were going home to. I hoped they all had someone waiting for them at the airport who’d smile at them the second they walked into Baggage Claim, who’d hug them and tell them they missed them and really mean it. Someone who’d drive them home and ask them all about their trip, let them crack open their chest and dump the weight of their day inside.
“Sorry, I’m being a downer,” Darryl said. I looked back at him. He plastered an almost believable smile on his face. “Tell me about your boyfriend. Billy, right? I remember that one time he dropped by just to say hey, just because he missed you. He’s no Jeremy. He’ll be a good daddy.”
“Yeah, he’s the best,” I said.
Darryl stared at my belly. “Can I touch?”
I grabbed the bottle from his hand and took a swig, leaving barely another mouthful. “No.”
* * *
—
SOMETIMES PEOPLE I went to high school with called in.
At best, it was awkward. They’d open the door and, no matter how long it took them to place me, when they did, their smiles would fall for a second. The next second, their smiles would be back and forced, acting like we were meeting on purpose and not because they were hungry and about to pay me. They’d try to hug me, shout, “Class of 2011!” I’d pretend I would be open to hugging if only I wasn’t holding the pizza they ordered. I’d offer them their box in one hand, hold out the open palm of my other for money, hoping to end the interaction as quickly as possible. They’d ignore my moves and ask me if it was true about the baby. After the first few times, I stopped asking how they’d heard about it—everyone was friends with or had a friend that was friends with Billy, had bumped into him over the past two weeks, and had heard him gush about the baby and everything he had planned. They loved talking about how brave I was, that people could fuck off if they didn’t approve, their sister’s friend’s sister was pregnant out of high school, baby socks were the cutest things in the whole world. What they were doing in the fall inevitably came next.
“And I really think that majoring in communications at Cal State Long Beach is going to be a great start to the rest of my adult life.”
“Totally.”
“What’re you doing?”
“I don’t know.”
It seemed as if there was nothing more uncomfortable that I could say. They could support a teenage pregnancy, but not this, not a person who drifted from one moment to the next without any idea about where she was headed. Their smiles would fall again, longer this time, they’d need to look away for a moment to recover. When they turned back, they’d stare at the bridge of my nose, the gap between my eyebrows, the center of my forehead, anywhere but my eyes, a place where their own insecurities might be reflected back to them, murky in the brown of my irises. “That’s so cool,” they would mumble in my direction, might cough or rub the side of their arm, lace their fingers together. “That’s so cool.” Another pause. “So—how much do I owe you?” On my walk back to my car, they’d shout out to say hi to Billy.
It was worse when they didn’t remember me at all.
They’d open the door and look at me like we’d never passed each other in hallways, drunk from the same low-pressure water fountains, copied off each other’s tests, laughed at teachers that didn’t care, laughed at teachers that cared too much, seen each other at the Burger King where you could buy cheap weed. Stanley Luna told me once at a party that I had a killer rack. Standing on his doorstep with two boxes of Extra Sausage, Extra Cheese, Normal Sauce, he barely looked up from his phone, quickly thrust bills and a few coins into my hand, said, “Thanks much,” while closing the door.
Whether they remembered or didn’t remember me, I’d take the long route back to Eddie’s. No matter how loud I turned up the radio, I couldn’t avoid thinking about one fact—even if I wasn’t pregnant, I would be in the exact same place I was now.
Billy used to lie in bed filling out college applications on his laptop. I’d lie next to him, hands behind my head, eyes closed, the clacking of his keyboard soothing me, putting me into the state on the edge of sleep.
Pizza Girl Page 5
