Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  “About what?”

  “They’ll give you an assigned topic, Devon, so you need practice with that.”

  “You’re giving me a topic?”

  He nods at her and smiles. “I am.”

  “Do I have to write it right now?”

  “Yep. You’ll have forty-five minutes.”

  She looks out the window, squints at the sun on the yarrow and asters against the fence. “You know I don’t even want to do this.”

  “You’ll thank me later, Devy. At least college will remain an option for you.”

  “I’ll never go to college.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I hate school.”

  “Not when you were little. You used to run up to me with your report cards. Nothing but A’s.”

  She glances at him, her eyes incredulous and resigned, as if she sees just what she thought she would. It makes him feel old.

  “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “All right.”

  “Well? What’s my topic?”

  He has no idea what to say. But he opens his mouth and begins to speak. “I want you to write about something bad that’s happened to you, something you wish did not happen but you ended up learning a lot from it anyway.”

  She rests her finger on the lip of the glass. “Something bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you mean by bad?” Her chin is low. She’s looking at him as if he’s just revealed something bad about himself, and he can see his mistake. She thinks he’s trying to draw her out, to tell him things Marie in her emails has alluded to without any real specifics, mainly the depression Marie fears she’s passed on to her daughter.

  “I’ll leave that to you. Anything from burning a batch of cookies to whatever comes, but make it honest and don’t skimp on the details.”

  “Cookies?” There’s a patronizing but mischievous light in her eyes, and he feels them both shift back onto safer ground.

  “Brownies then.”

  “I need my headphones. I can’t write without music.”

  “They won’t be allowed during the test, Devon.”

  “I hate this.”

  “I know.” He pushes toward her a notebook, pencil, and pen. He peers at his watch, and he ignores her bare foot beginning to tap under the table. “Begin . . . now.”

  SHE WANTS A CIGARETTE. She hasn’t for a while, but she does now. Outside the glass doors, Francis waters flowers with a hose. He looks so much older in the sunlight, his shoulders slightly hunched, his eyebrows bushy and white. She stares down at the open notebook. She keeps tapping her heel on the carpet. With no music in her head, there’s too much in her head: Trina’s Facebook page. The word WHORE under the picture of Devon at a pool party. It might have been at home, it could have been at the Welches’, but it was last summer, her in that red bikini, one arm around Davey Price, the other Rick Battastini. They had just lifted her up, and she liked this picture because even with her legs in the air, her body leaning forward, her stomach looked flat and tanned, and all three of them were laughing and two seconds later Davey and Rick tossed her backwards into the pool, but Trina didn’t take that picture.

  Trina, who’d been her best friend since they were twelve. Half-Italian like her, her breasts were already showing in seventh grade, and by freshman year they were big, her waist small, her hair black and curly while Devon’s was long and too straight, her breasts small, her hips like a boy’s so she ran faster in track and would’ve gotten stuck going only to lower classmen jock parties if it weren’t for Trina who dated seniors like Bobby Connors. He worked and drove an almost new Sentra and would pick them up down in Lafayette Square. Trina had told her mother she was watching movies at Devon’s and Devon had told her mother she was watching movies at Trina’s, and Trina would sit up front with Bobby, his black Nike cap sideways on his head, his whiskers shaved into a chin strap like a West Coast rapper. He was big from lifting weights, but his blue eyes looked sweet even when he was trying to look badass.

  His best friend Luke McDonough was almost always in the backseat. He had blond hair he gelled into a sideways flow across his forehead, and he was constantly chewing gum, texting someone as she climbed in, smiling at her though his eyes never really seemed to see her. Gangsta rap would be shouting out from Bobby’s speakers, and Bobby would be driving before Devon had even buckled up, something she stopped doing once she noticed Trina never did.

  It was always about the house parties. They’d cruise from one to the next, sometimes hitting three or four in one night. They’d pass vodka nips around because you could toss them out the window if you got pulled over and vodka didn’t stay on your breath like other things did. Some parties were in quiet neighborhoods or culs-de-sac, and they had to keep the noise down for the cops. But the best ones were in houses in the woods or out on Whittier Lake, Luke McDonough’s place when his mother and father were away for the night. His father sold computers or something, and his mother worked in a bank and they had a pool and a boathouse with a motorboat in it, though Luke never let anybody take it out, even when he was shit-faced.

  That was a bad thing that happened. Maybe one of the first. Devon picks up the pen, then drops it for the pencil. She writes Luke’s boat. She and Luke sitting on the cushioned seat of the boat in its dark little house that smelled like wood and something decaying in the water. From where they sat, Luke’s arm around her shoulders, they could look past the boat’s windshield and out the open doorway to the dark water and the tiny lights of houses on the other side of the lake. It was October but warm. The dead leaves in Luke’s yard had felt like dried skins under her feet. She’d been drinking hard lemonade with Trina and two other girls since the sun went down, and from the boathouse she could hear the party in the McDonoughs’ behind them, thirty or forty kids, most of them upperclassmen and most of them guys, Luke’s hand on her breast over her sweater now. In Luke’s basement was a playroom with a wide-screen TV and a pool table under a low green light shaped like a fish. There were deep leather couches and chairs and a soft carpet under your feet, and on the TV was Call of Duty, soldiers’ heads getting blown off in a blood splatter by boys with game controls in their jerking hands. Dubstep thumped from the surround sound and Devon could feel the bass drops in her crotch, but she’d been laughing with Trina and Allie or Ava Something, a blond girl with the tattoo of a black bird at the base of her neck right where her collarbone was, and Devon had kept staring at it, even while she was laughing at something, and then she couldn’t look at the bird anymore and she was over by the ping-pong table under a brighter light, this one a rectangle of stained glass like in churches, but it hurt her eyes to stare at it and two boys had been swatting the little white ball back and forth but now three or four guys and girls on each end were playing Beirut, trying to flip one over the net into a Solo cup of Bud Light they would then have to down, and that’s when she heard Luke yell over the Dubstep and all the laughing and loud talking and kill shouts from the CoD boys, “Watch the table! Watch the fucking table!” But his voice was just noise swept away by the party wind, and anyway he looked too drunk to do much about it. His flow had drooped over one eye, and one collar of his blue polo was up, the other down, and it reminded her of dog ears and maybe she was smiling when he looked over at her propped against the wall, an empty bottle in her hand, because he smiled back. It was the first time he’d ever really looked over at her and seen her. Then he was standing in front of her, his face so close she saw the shaving rash under his chin and they were talking, trying to talk, but nobody talked. On the other side of the pong table, seven or ten kids sat all over each other on a long couch and each one of them was staring at the iEverything in their hands, their faces lit with a soft white glow. Some of them were texting with one thumb, and she knew others were updating their Fuckbook pages.

  Rockin’ at Luke’s. Cum ovah!

  Luke’s sucks. Where r u?

  Then Luke had her by the hand and was lead
ing her out through the sweaty noise past the sliding doors he left open to the yard and the dead leaves under her feet, the covered pool.

  “I’m drunk, Dev. I’m fuckin’ toasted.”

  She was talking too but does not remember what she said. She can still feel, though, the way her face had felt like cooled wax and she’d probably been smiling at him too hard. He was looking at her differently now. She was wearing tight jeans and a low-cut sweater she regretted because she was too warm in it, her hair down when she wanted it up, and he was taking all this in like he’d just discovered how to solve a math problem he’d been putting off. Then she was letting him take her hand and lead her down to the boathouse, and they’d been sitting in his boat kissing for a while when he took her fingers and pulled them onto his hard-on still under his pants. It was the second one she’d ever touched. The first was her cousin Steve’s when she was ten and he was twelve, and he’d stood in her room and unzipped his shorts and shown it to her like it was a small animal he’d found outside.

  “Just touch it, Devon. Big deal. Then, you know, you’ll know.”

  Know what? she’d wanted to ask, but Steve had always been big and a little scary and all she had to do was put one finger on it to make him go away, and she was surprised how warm it was, almost hot. “See?” he’d said. “Now lick it.” And Devon had run past him, jerking open the door to her own room and slamming it behind her.

  But now she was fourteen and Luke wasn’t Steve, his tongue sliding around inside her mouth. He tasted like beer and wintergreen gum, and he’d moved his hand to her cheek and Devon liked how gentle it felt against her skin and she concentrated on that instead of her hand over his hard-on, and Trina was always teasing Devon for being a mouth virgin. Everybody gave BJs. You couldn’t get pregnant, and it satisfied boys for a while so you didn’t have to do anything else, and it made them want to be only with you. Trina said you got more respect if you swallowed. Like running an extra lap after working your ass off just to show you could. Then Luke’s zipper was open, and his hard-on was in her hand, and it was stiff and warm and she was surprised by how soft the skin was.

  THE FRENCH DOOR OPENS. Francis walks in carrying white flowers. She presses both hands over her notebook, over Luke’s boat, but he doesn’t even look down at the two words she’s written. He just closes the door and walks past her at the table like she’s not there. She watches him take a glass vase from a cabinet and place it in the kitchen sink and fill it with water.

  “I can’t write with you standing there.”

  “People will be in that testing room with you, Devy.” He winks at her and pushes the white flowers stem-first into the vase. His glasses hang on a string against his chest, and she can see a sweat stain under the arm of his yellow shirt, and he’s every adult who ever stood in her way starting with her father and in this moment she hates him.

  Except she doesn’t. Her cheeks grow hot, and she feels ashamed. She needs music in her head. Something that will block out the bad or else lead her right to it.

  Uncle Francis sets the vase of white flowers in the middle of the table, and she can smell them and his old man smell that makes her sad. As soon as he’s gone she writes under Luke’s boat—

  Uncle Francis dying

  But that hasn’t happened yet, and it better not happen anytime soon. There was Aunt Beth lying in her coffin in that periwinkle dress that was all wrong for her. There were the framed photographs set on small tables around the funeral home, pictures of Aunt Beth and Francis when they were young, and Devon was surprised how pretty she’d been, sexy even, her hair thick and blond, her lips fuller, and there was the way she leaned her cheek into Uncle Francis’s shoulder.

  Devon writes: Aunt Beth dying. Then she crosses it out and writes: Getting old. But that hasn’t happened yet either, though she feels as if it has; she has gotten old. Years and years before she was supposed to. Just tired of it all. Just wanting to be left alone now. Except there’s Sick, too. The way he never quite leaves her. She writes:

  Sick finding out.

  And she remembers his face on the other side of the small window to the right of her front door. The week before, he’d dyed his hair red but in the sunlight it looked purple, his long bangs hanging over half his face like they always did. She could only see his left eye, but it looked bloodshot and puffy, and his narrow shoulders were slumped in his Kurt Cobain T-shirt, no coat though it was cold out, and it was seeing Cobain’s face on Sick’s chest that made her open the door, that gun Cobain forever sang he never had when he did all along and now he’s not on earth anymore.

  “How’s it coming?” Francis’s voice shoots from the doorway between the kitchen and living room. She does not turn her head to look at him.

  “I can’t fucking do this.”

  “Yes you can, Devy.”

  “Do I have to write something bad?”

  “I guess not. Write whatever you want, but write something. You have thirty-one more minutes.”

  She hears the creak of the floorboards under the rug in the living room, the flap of a newspaper page. But what is she going to write about now? Something good? What the fuck was good?

  Her mom’s cooking. Every time.

  Sausage lasagna, manicotti, eggplant parmigiana, meatloaf with gravy. The mac and cheese she baked in the oven, then served in a steaming square alongside green peas and pearl onions in a wine butter sauce.

  Devon writes:

  When I was twelve years old, my mom taught me how to make eggplant parmigiana. She told me the secret was to first bake the breaded slices of eggplant and not to fry them because then it all comes out too oily and the eggplant tastes too much like eggplant which nobody really likes when you think about it.

  Devon sips her iced tea. Her heel is tapping again under the table. She reads over what she’s just written. She crosses out when you think about it. She remembers how sharp the knife was, her mother showing her how to grip the eggplant firmly so it wouldn’t slip while you cut it into slices very thin. “An eighth of an inch.” Devon did not know what an eighth of an inch looked like, and she was wondering how her mother knew and that’s when her father had breezed into the kitchen. It must’ve been summer because there was the clacking of his golf shoe cleats over the tiles. His hair was combed back, and he must have been leaving and not coming home because his eyes were still clear and when he smiled at them both, he really seemed happy to see them, even his wife. “Ooh, look at this. My favorite girls cooking my favorite dish.” He walked around the island and kissed Devon’s mother on the cheek and Devon on her forehead, then he was gone and not long after Devon sliced her finger cutting the third eggplant, this one slippery because she hadn’t dried it after washing it, even though her mother warned her about that. Her blood looked so bright and wrong on the cutting board, and her mother grabbed it to rinse it off and told her there were Band-Aids in their bedroom’s bathroom cabinet, and now Devon writes:

  Wrapping my finger in a bandaid while staring at the stack of Penthouse magazines on the back of my father’s toilet.

  There were so many of them—twenty, twenty-five—and she must’ve seen them before and known about them, but she had her own bathroom off her own bedroom so why would she?

  Devon writes:

  Sitting on the closed toilet and ignoring my throbbing finger I wrapped too tightly with a bandaid

  Opening my dad’s dirty magazine and seeing a hard penis pointing at the hole of a vagina

  Feeling sick because the only vagina I’d seen that up close was my own two months before this when I had to use a mirror for my first tampon.

  She’d done it herself without asking her mother for any help. She’d felt grown-up and a little scared but strong and ready for whatever would come next. But this magazine of her father’s made her feel young and stupid, ugly even, and Devon closed it and put it back on the stack. And was it later in the kitchen, dipping the eggplant slices into the milk and raw egg, then the bread crumbs, that she began to w
onder about her mother? Her heavy, beautiful mother who smiled at everyone and treated them as if they were special and deserved kindness just because they were alive? Was it then, the first time Devon had helped her to bake eggplant parmigiana, that she began to feel sorry for her own mother?

  “Sixteen minutes, Devy,” Uncle Francis calls this out from the living room. Devon stares down at the notebook. She reads what she’s written, ending with my first tampon. She crosses out the small t and makes it a big one. Then she crosses out the whole paragraph because this is bullshit. All of it. The reason why she hates school in the first place. Everything so fucking fake. She can’t write about her vagina or her father’s magazines. They want her to write about making eggplant parmigiana with her mother so it shows how close they are; they want Devon to write that this is a precious memory for her, one that has helped her to become “the confident person I am today,” and she needs to do all this in five paragraphs, her conclusion a neat echo of her introduction, which she does not have. They want her to type it up with no misspellings, all the rules obeyed, every mark of punctuation right where it should be, then they want her to solve math problems and science problems; they want her to memorize important dates from history and be able to point to any country and its capital on a map, all of this and more so that she can what? Pretend she walked up onstage in a borrowed gown with a bunch of fucking drunks and hypocrites like Trina? Get a framed piece of paper with her name on it so she can look forward to another four years of sitting in more classrooms on some campus somewhere, memorizing and writing and reading just so she can get another piece of paper with her name on it? And then what? Get some job sitting at a desk in some office in some building in some city where they’ll pay her money just so she can use it to have a house of her own on a quiet street like Haven Court with a green lawn her husband will cut on the weekends when he’s not sitting in the pool drinking a vodka tonic, thumbing through his iEverything for a half-naked picture of his girlfriend?

  Devon writes: