On the night of the dance, Hunter appeared on my doorstep, red sneakers peeking out from beneath his dress pants. He brought me a flower, a big silvery lily, not a little girl’s wrist corsage but the kind that had to be pinned to the bodice of my dress. I could smell the mints from the rectangular case perpetually silhouetted in his left front pocket.
Hunter shielded my breast with his palm, easing the pin through the dense beaded fabric of my dress. When it was done he stepped back to consider his work. Took my hand in both of his.
“Perfect,” he said.
He held my hand all night. When he had to let go—to pick up a fork, or go to the bathroom, or gesture as he spoke—he gave me a little tap, as if to say: “I’ll be right back.” He opened every door for me and laughed at all my jokes. We slow danced. And I grew bolder, sure I was going to have a boyfriend. I let my happiness hang out of my dress like a third breast.
We did not kiss at the dance, although every moment I thought we might. When they dimmed the lights. On the dance floor. While we stood in the hall and he got quiet and I got quiet. But it didn’t happen then, or when the lights came up, or as we filtered out to the chilly subterranean parking lot and climbed into his mother’s sedan. A pearl rosary dangled from the rearview mirror. He turned the key in the ignition and high soaring synths filled the car.
Hunter laid his hand on mine where it sat in my lap, and pressed his mouth to my ear. “I want to be alone with you. Tonight.”
All I could do was frantically nod. We rode the glimmering Eisenhower out of the city. The tall buildings on either side had always seemed forbidding, massive ships threatening to embark, but with Hunter they became friendly sentries squared against the orange-purple sky. We entered Creek Grove and I realized Hunter was taking us to the grade school where we had both attended kindergarten through fourth grade. That we hadn’t known each other then seemed amazing to me. I had been near him, so close for so long, and not even felt it.
Hunter parked, came around to my side of the car, and opened my door. “My lady,” he said, and I forced my breathing slow.
We walked to the old playground, hot night wind spreading my skirt behind me. We swung on the swings, falling and floating, that fantastic arc. Eventually Hunter suggested we go sit on the bench under the trees behind the school.
In elementary school that bench was where I hid from the other girls. Their favorite game was the one where they interrogated me to prove I wasn’t as smart as everyone thought I was. If I answered right, I was doomed. “She thinks she’s smart, too,” they sneered. Back then I thought the bench had powers of invisibility and protection and fated magic—a node of energy—and maybe I hadn’t been wrong, because now I was going to sit on it with a boy. This boy, with marked arms and hair as soft as the evening air. I was going to touch it. Move it through my fingers.
On the bench Hunter pulled a tiny bottle of vodka out of his jacket.
“Is that from an airplane?” I asked.
“A minibar. I raided one with my cousin last summer. I’ve been saving it. Brought you one too.” Hunter retrieved a twin bottle from his other pocket and handed it to me. I had a brief moment of feeling superior—his idea of a dangerous good time was two mouthfuls of tepid vodka, while I had been mixing cocktails with Sylvie since middle school—but then I realized how sweet it was that he had thought of me. We made little wordless toasts, nodding at each other. When our bottles were empty, I wasn’t drunk, just cold. Hunter took off his jacket. I thrilled to wrap myself in it.
For a while our silence was companionable. Hunter dragged his feet through the dirt under the bench. Then the quiet grew loose and unnerving. The moon was yellow and too bright in my eyes. I wondered when the kissing would start.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
Hunter started laughing again and couldn’t stop. There was some sound under the laughter, something like “you.” Maybe a word, maybe not. I had never seen him like this. In class he was still and calm. Now his gurgling escalated. None of this seemed to include me.
“Hunter, I can’t understand you,” I said finally.
He shut up so quickly it scared me. The wind pushed his hair into his eyes. He jerked it away and kissed me hard. My first. I realized then he had been drinking all night. All those trips to the bathroom. But I didn’t care. His tongue was finally in my mouth. I had wanted to feel it there for so long.
We broke and stared at each other. His eyes were wild as he pushed the straps off my shoulders. I unbuttoned his shirt and pressed my palm to the center of his chest, disbelieving my bravery. We kissed again, his heart having a fit under my palm. He spread his jacket over the little patch of land behind the sandbox that no one could see from the street.
It was easy to take off our clothes, to be next to each other in our underwear. I wasn’t scared at all. Had I ever been? Our bodies stretched through the soupy night.
Hunter undid his pants and took off my underwear. Pretty silver butterfly-motif lace, my nicest pair. I had worn them special. The sky was so big. I lay down, air highlighting me between my legs.
He got on top. Rubbed himself against me, parting my pubic hair. That blunt edge. Oh.
I wanted to have sex. I had said yes. It was only complicated for a minute. Then it wasn’t, and there was a rushing sense of another, inside and outside. Betwixt. Severe.
The wind licked my shoulders and neck. I felt a way I had not known before, the way a person cannot make herself feel, a place she cannot go alone. I opened my mouth and made a little sound and I could not believe I had spoken. In the instant, all I wanted was to know that nothing had changed.
Hunter answered with a yelp, as if he were hurt. A single inelegant jerk of his body.
I wanted to say something but couldn’t think.
He rolled away. Pulled out. Knelt to do up his pants.
I lay feeling not what I had felt. I didn’t know how much time I needed to get there, or where there was, even. I had only an idea, from myself. A warm golden room, an oval.
“Come back,” I said, forcing a smile into my voice. “I didn’t—”
He squinted. “You didn’t what?”
I kept smiling at him.
Hunter’s face darkened. He stared at the ground. “My parents made me promise I’d be back at one. We should get going.”
I pulled the collar of his jacket up around my neck, imagining he was kissing me there. I wanted him to touch me again: my shoulders and neck and between my legs. But that was done. My discarded dress’s cheap silver stars puddled around me. I stood to step back into it, revealing my ruined lily, crushed beneath some limb, and felt an odd dripping. His semen tracing down my thighs.
Hunter handed me my underwear without looking at me.
He was too drunk to drive and seemed to have forgotten about his car. We walked to my house in silence. The moonlight had taken on a wintry cast. When we got to my yard I asked quickly so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. “Would you come inside and say hi to my mom?”
I could see her silhouette in the front room through the curtains. She was reading. Not waiting up, just still up. It was not late.
Hunter laughed, kind of, pointing to the dirt on his jacket, and smiled at me as if we had come to a mutual understanding. He gave my hand a last little tap and turned away. I went inside alone, feeling jagged.
Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I wasn’t planning to tell Mama, but when I saw her sedately arranged in her pajamas with a book in her hands, I just started talking. If he wouldn’t talk to me about it, she would. Someone had to pay attention to me. For the dance my parents had granted me an evening without a curfew, meaningless now. Everyone, including me, had assumed something was going to happen. But it hadn’t. Why? I wanted someone to tell me. It would have to be her.
She became more and more erect as I spoke, until finally she was standing, pacing. “Please tell me you used protection,” Mama said when I stopped talking.
I had forgott
en protection even existed. She went into the bathroom and locked the door. I sat listening to her yell.
Mama came back, her purse already slung over her shoulder. “Get in the car, Roxana.”
We drove past dark houses. For a few minutes I thought Mama was taking me somewhere to get rid of me, that she was done with me for good. Instead she pulled into the parking lot of the twenty-four-hour drugstore and steered me through the fluorescent aisles to the pharmacy counter, where a very young woman in a white coat sold us the morning-after pill. It was two pills, actually, identical and pale. I couldn’t tell them apart from the ibuprofen tablet Mama gave me to take too.
“This way we don’t have to worry,” Mama said, tucking me into bed. We, I thought. Like it was my parents’ body, not mine. Like it was their choice. Maybe I wanted something to worry about. Something real. “But next time you’re sure as hell going to use protection. I’m going to make you an appointment to get on birth control this week. Do you have any questions?” Her nurse’s poker face: straightforward, willing to deliver necessary information. As if she wanted me to request a tutorial, an informational pamphlet. A demonstration on a banana.
I shook my head. No one would want to touch me again, I was sure. For years, certainly, maybe for the rest of my life.
The pills made me sick enough that Mama let me miss school on Monday. Later, there would be a repeat of this sickness, turned down in volume, when I began my birth control prescription and started swallowing a small peach-colored tablet dry every night before bed, and I wouldn’t be allowed to miss school at all, despite the nausea and exhaustion the drug brought on as my body adjusted. But on the Monday after Homecoming I was allowed to stay in bed all day, drinking ginger ale and waiting for Hunter to call. When the phone finally rang after school, it was just Sylvie. There would only be Sylvie, now, as before.
“Oh my God, Rox,” she said. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands.”
That made me smile.
“Still, though,” she went on. “I’m not exactly surprised. I totally saw this coming.”
I waited for her to tell me why, grateful to be welcomed back into our world.
“Roxana.” Søren reached across the table.
I drained my beer. “Sorry I talked for so long.”
He shook his head. “That boy was an asshole, yes? Did he apologize?”
I laughed. “No.”
The next Monday I found out that Hunter had asked Mr. Dungeness for a new lab partner. For the rest of the year the teacher himself worked with me, fumbling niceties behind his smudged glasses, obviously embarrassed by the evidence of a social drama of which he wanted no part.
“Sylvie said he was probably really embarrassed. That men have a hard time with things like that. Their pride gets hurt. And that Hunter was obviously immature, that she had noticed that from the beginning.”
Søren stood, collecting our empty glasses. “It’s getting late. Shall we have a last drink?”
I nodded and followed on wobbly legs. The bartender exchanged our empty pints for two tiny glasses, which he filled with a clear liquid from an unlabeled brown bottle.
“Schnapps,” Søren said, like the name of someone he loved. “We call it a little sharp one. For after dinner, the end of the night. Now.”
He picked up one of the tiny glasses. I lifted the other.
“To better days,” Søren said, and drained his glass. The liquor burned its way down my throat, leaving me coughing. Søren and the bartender laughed, exclaiming to each other, and we left the bar. Outside, the air was cool and the setting sun dressed the storefronts in fading light.
I was still gasping. “What did you say to him?”
Søren smiled. “That you are better than us. Not so used to the poison.”
I felt seasick. He was a fast walker. I had to concentrate to keep up.
We passed a group of blonde women with beautiful shoulders. Søren did not turn, peering instead at me with concern. I ducked my head to hide my smile as we descended into the subway.
I must have fallen asleep on the train. The next thing I remember was a feeling like surfacing from great depth, Søren nudging me with his elbow. The light hurt my eyes. I followed him off the train and up onto the darkened street. The buildings were blocky mountains rising into the purple sky, deep purple, more blue than red. Shot through with stars. Silver thread wrapped around everything. Søren took my arm. The warmth of his body. Under my feet the sidewalk rolled like in a cartoon. I sat so that I wouldn’t fall. He said my name and laughter caught in my throat. He hoisted me under my armpits and pushed me up the stairs. “Wait,” I said. “Wait.” But we were already in the foxwoman’s hallway. She appeared in the shadows in a robe of quilted milk. Robert came out of the darkness and pushed his giant nose into my crotch. I laughed until I couldn’t breathe. The foreigners sounded like birds. Søren took me into my room and sat me on my bed. How kind of him, I thought. His arms moved, reaching for me, I thought.
Instead Søren took the little digital alarm clock, set it, and put it down on the bedside table. “Goodnight, Roxana,” he said.
I went to hug him, but changed my mind and lunged for a kiss instead. My wet, open mouth landed on his neck. He pulled away.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
He disappeared. I stretched out on the little bed and closed my eyes. I saw the place where Hunter’s fine hair touched his soft neck. Søren’s eyes. “Of course he acted like that, Roxana,” I heard Sylvie say. “It was too much too soon. I almost feel sorry for him.”
On and on we rode in the golden dawn, the trees thick and green over us. Into their purple shadow, out into fuzzed light. Again. Cirrus on the horizon, running clementine to outer space blue. To turn we leaned into the bend. Thought of leaning. Dreamed the cicada whirring of wheels. We didn’t glide. We flew.
I stopped my panting to listen for Sylvie’s. My chest pistoned and the edges of my vision flashed. But even after I heaved, fire in my lungs, I couldn’t hear her.
We rounded the thumb-like green rise blotted with impatiens. A stout brick edifice appeared, sturdy on its broad plot. Our high school. I let go of my handlebars and straddled my seat, seeking my old face in the windows on the top floor.
Sylvie spun past, her pink sneakers braced against the pedals, her kite’s tail the long black braids she had tied with green ribbon.
“Loser!” She called behind her.
The day became opaque, the sky evening to blue, disappearing the gold. Bared sun beat the back of my neck.
I closed my eyes. Loser. Come on. Loser. Do it, loser. When I opened them, she was gone.
I dismounted and began the walk down the hill.
Once Sylvie’s bike had been a tiny pink thing with white wheels, its handlebars sprouting sparkling silver streamers. Now it was an Italian model slim and shiny as silverware, for which her parents had paid three thousand dollars. An entirely different species from the scuffed black three speed I had inherited from Dad.
Sylvie jutted a hip in my direction, her mouth curving a closed smile. “Feel better?”
“No. I haven’t heard anything since the interview.”
“‘Cause you killed it.”
“I had trouble getting the video to work.”
She sighed, thumbs flying on her phone. “Even after we practiced?”
“I don’t think it was my fault.”
“You’re right.” Sylvie laughed. “It must have been International Abroad Experiences, which does like a hundred of these a day. Not my best friend who is a little forgetful. Hmm. I wonder.” She drawled the last syllable of the word.
I yanked my shirt down over my hips. It immediately hiked itself back up.
The street was absolutely quiet, the school and fields staged and empty as a diorama.
The night before, the night after graduation, we were in her bedroom, still in our white dresses, hair sprayed hard to hold against the wind, shimmery rivulets of eye makeup striping my fac
e. Had anyone remembered to take a picture before I started crying about the divorce?
Sylvie pressed an ice cube wrapped in a paper towel to my eyes, smoothed my hair back under a headband, gave me cold water from a blue mug. Held my hot hands in her cool dry ones. She sat behind me and locked her arms just under my breasts. My ass filled the concave basin of her lap. She always smelled of lemons. Honey shampoo.
“I don’t think you understand,” I heard her whisper. “None of this shit matters at all. We did it. We made our dream happen. We are going to Paris.” My nipples tensed when her breath touched my ear. The mosquito net moved limply above us. I felt sad for it, a useful thing restrained from its true purpose. The windows in Sylvie’s room didn’t even open. Your dream, I thought and then felt bad, as I always did, for not better appreciating how generous she was to share it with me.
When I turned my head, Sylvie was asleep, mumbling something that might have been French. I switched off her bedside lamp and nuzzled between the cushy rises of her breasts, provoking little snores. Her heart beat low and steady beneath my ear.
My Danish hangover was a steady pain at the back of my head and a jumping stomachache. I was grateful that Søren didn’t speak. We were going somewhere to meet the other members of the program, a route that took us by pale buildings with many windows and peaked roofs and arches and painted molding, gilt-lettered names hung over their entrances. Restaurants and bars advertising steaks and drink specials, shops full of books I couldn’t read. An AFRO HAIR AND BODY SHOP displayed two enlarged photographs of a smiling blonde woman before and after the application of two feet of platinum weave. A set of massive gray buildings floated over the water. Filing cabinets for human beings.
“The university,” Søren said, turning to me. “Does your head hurt?”
“No.” My head immediately throbbed, punishment for lying. “Yes.”
He looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Roxana. It was a bad idea to go to the bar.”
“No!” My voice was too loud. “I had a good time.”
I thought of the kinds of things I should be asking him, to make our relationship real. “Søren, where are you from?”
Open Me Page 4
