I dismount, pulling my pants back on, and he uses the napkins from dinner to clean up. Hoo, he says. Hooee. Then he says, You want me to finish you off or something?
My pants are already back on, I tell him, and he relaxes. The bit of M&M is gone from his lip and I wonder if it’s somewhere in my pubic hair. Come here, he says, patting his chest. The napkin is still stuck to his skin and it flutters gently, like paper wings. I put my head on his shoulder and Jordan says We got to keep warm. He rubs my arm a little, then falls asleep, his nose whistling softly, a sweet garlicky smell blowing out of his open mouth.
My mother had given me the talk early. Seven years old. She said The man enters you and fills your emptiness. The man fills you up good and you should enjoy it when it happens.
I come out from under Jordan’s arm. Gooseflesh runs across his skin so I put his jacket over him. He doesn’t wake up when I open the car door or when I close it behind me.
It’s early enough in the fall that it’s still light enough out, and I begin walking down the mountain, my bare feet noiseless in the road. I smell sex on myself, salty, bleachlike, moist. I travel in a bubble of sex, sticky skin, used up. The few times Jordan and I have driven up or down the mountain I swear I’ve seen water, a lake or something, and I plan on using the last of the light to dip in, to make myself smell like anything else—mud, water, or nothing at all.
Jordan says only God can fill an emptiness. First God makes the emptiness, then he fills it.
I hear water moving somewhere close, and then a rustling in the trees. An animal walks out, some kind of big cat, and when it turns its face to me its eyes flash gold. We watch each other for a few seconds, and then I take my cue. Slowly, pushing through the trees, I make my way toward the water, undressing as I go. I don’t turn to see if the cat is following. Suddenly I think of the fat woman whose dress flew up at the bowling alley, and I have to fight back tears. I leave my underwear hanging from a sapling. I step into the water, willing the cat to follow, letting the water rush into my ears and over my head, knowing I will let the beast win this time.
I stay under until I can’t anymore. Water rushes out of my ears, the cat is gone, the sky is a blue bowl with black edges. I pretend this is a baptism and dunk myself under again. When I come up I see that the black edges are closing in. I make my way out of the water, get myself dressed, and head back to the road, back to Jordan. I’ll wake him up, order him to sit on the gear shift. I’m a walking emptiness, a vast nothing, but if I run I can beat the darkness.
WE WAS
There we were in the car with the outsides bleeding by us out the window. Our daddy every once in a while shook his head like he was trying to shake a fly from his ear. His wife wrapped some twine around her pointer finger until it was purple, turned around to smile big into the backseat, Everything’s okay children, everything’s just fine.
We saw a black bear lumbering along through the trees and Giddy said it was looking for a pot of honey or a stray dog. We passed some red licorice. Carnation had pink foam at the corners of her mouth from all the cramming.
The setting sun made a bruise of the evening sky. Carnation said the sun looked like a dollop of fancy mustard at the horizon.
It seemed like days ago that we’d pulled over and our daddy had yanked Davey out and left him on the highway by a mile marker. They’s some jelly beans and limeade in this bag, our daddy said, and dropped a paper sack at Davey’s feet. Davey’s chin trembled so bad his teeth were chattering and our daddy said Aw suck it up, we’ll be seein you. Davey stood in his spot and watched us drive on and in our dust he looked like a spirit. It was mile marker 77.
Daddy’s wife asked to pull over so she could empty her jar. We watched her squat over a dead bush a few yards away from the car and pee on into it. Our daddy flicked his head again, whispered, It was his time, you pack of dummies. He was fixin to overpower me. Daddy’s wife let down her dress and started walking back. Do you know, our daddy hissed, that Davey would have carved the faces from your bodies and snacked on your flesh like it was a hog’s ear?
Carnation told our daddy to unlock the door for his wife. When she got back in she turned around to smile big at us and it was clear by her smell that she’d watered down her leg a little. Our daddy put the car back on the road and peeled his tires.
And then the sky was black as a dog’s eye but for where the moon flickered through the trees. Our daddy started humming one of his songs. His wife stumbled along with him, her voice like a choked bird but it was clear she didn’t know the tune.
After a while our headlights were sweeping over Grandmother’s motel. She came out with an arm over her eyes and our daddy said Goddamn and switched off the lights. She knocked on our window and said, What a snoutful of brass buttons. Her teeth looked like they were hacked from planks and she jangled a ring of keys at us like a witch’s charms. You ain’t nothing but a pile of wet stars in a bathtub drain. Our daddy said, That’s just her idjit way and we got out of the car.
Grandmother dropped the keys and sidewindered away into the darkness. We watched our daddy have his way with his wife in the first room where a key fit, her smiling big and saying, Everything’s so wonderful, children, and our daddy working her into the headboard like he was nailing up a granite cross.
We took a bath and watched out the bathroom window. Sure enough Davey’s ghost came fluttering in flimsy as a leaf husk and settled on the toilet. We could see right through to the ruby jewel pump in his chest. You want me to I can gather up that navy winking sky and make us a diamondsparkled sail of it, Davey said, and his voice was the same but unnatural, like some busted chorus of bells clattered out his throat along with everything else. We could visit all them quilt patches on the map, but before we could answer Daddy’s wife came and sat down to do her business and Davey’s ghost burst up like an exploded feather pillow, his parts settling unnoticed on Daddy’s wife like how dust is gold in a stream of sunlight but regular and dirty in the no-light. Giddy splashed up some water in disgust and Daddy’s wife clapped her hands while the Davey motes shivered off her and fell into the toilet and swirled down to the underworld. God strike you lonely then dead, Carnation whispered and Daddy’s wife giggled and pulled up her undies and left us.
Davey’s faint jangling still hung in the air and one by one we climbed from the window and jumped. Giddy twisted up her ankle and began to crawl. Grandmother was in the office looking like a drugged specimen in a yellow lightbox, her feet up on the desk and her skirt open and a glint of drool working its way down her neck, and we continued on past her and past the motel itself and into the dark thatchery behind.
It was the moon brought us there. Daddy told us our mother’s dumb forlorn soul wafted up to that white eye and got tangled up in its eyelashes, and there the moon was staring wildly from the treetops. Carnation said we was lost and we should pray and sure enough Grandmother’s motel had disappeared into a dark nothing behind us, and we knelt in the dirt and held hands and whispered bright nothing prayers and begged for an angel’s shovel to dig Davey up from the sewage so he could show us his candied heart once more. We prayed the moon would unstopper long enough to suck us through to the other side so we could see how dull the stars were at their backsides. Far off our daddy began calling for us, and we pretended it was a wolf’s howling, or a car rushing down a highway, or that loud emptiness you hear when there’s nothing to hear and pretty soon you start believing there never ever was.
LOOFAH
He woke up after having a dream of falling. Just before he fell this guy from his college trigonometry class walked toward him shirtless. Then he fell.
He opened his eyes and watched his girlfriend jump around the room on one foot. Charley horse, she yelled accusingly. Her big toe was stuck in the up position. He had a throbbing hard-on and figured it was just as painful.
His throat was dry so he got up and went into the bathroom. He popped a zit in the crease between his nose and cheek and slurped at the water com
ing out of the faucet. His girlfriend limped in and stood behind him until he met her eyes in the mirror. You could’ve helped, she said.
What could I have done? he asked her. He answered himself: Nothing. His girlfriend sighed, sat on the toilet with her shirt bunched between her legs. This had always been his dirtiest fantasy, ever since he was a child: a girl’s exposed thighs and the delicate sounds of her pee stream hitting the water.
His girlfriend was in a punishing mood. Get out, she said. He leaned over and kissed her forehead, maneuvered his hard-on under the waistband of his boxer shorts.
He found a soft orange in the kitchen with very thin skin. Its insides were bloodcolored and dry. He put it back in the fridge and stacked its peels in the middle of the stove.
It was raining outside. He could see a faint reflection of himself in the window. The guy in his dream was shirtless. His girlfriend had beautiful ice-cream-scoop breasts. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend had pillowy dicksucking lips. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend often played with his balls when she was bored. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend got drunk almost every night and breathed Let’s get nasty into his ear to the point where the smell of margarita mix got him hard. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend let him tie her up once. The guy in the dream was shirtless. His girlfriend the guy in the dream was shirtless.
It’s raining, his girlfriend said behind him. She opened the fridge and he stood behind her and tried to finger her. It made him think of the dry bloodcolored orange and he gave it up.
Jake. The guy in his trig class’s name was Jake. They’d gone out once, to a frat party, and had ended up making out with two girls who’d been standing by the keg all night. He’d done too many shots of tequila and at the end of it all he’d pushed Jake up against a dumpster on campus somewhere and sucked at his neck. He remembered Jake grabbing his ass and biting his ear, and it turned him on until Jake punched him in the solar plexus and he realized he was getting his ass kicked. He threw up on Jake’s shoes and fell asleep on someone’s discarded bag of McDonald’s. He stopped going to trig and flunked out and had to take an extra semester.
Bagels? his girlfriend asked. Butter? Cream cheese? He’d met his girlfriend at a bar and they’d ended up dry humping against a jukebox playing “Freebird,” had been together ever since. I’m not hungry, he said. It thundered loudly and he yelled over it, I gotta take a dump.
In the bathroom he stared at himself in the mirror. He imagined that his body was an elaborate empty coffin. Here lies Nothing. Here lies No One. He could smell the bagel burning in the toaster, heard his girlfriend hiss Shit. He masturbated with her mint green loofah and appletini body wash, crouching over the toilet so that when he came there’d be nothing to clean up, no trace of anything ever happening.
MARIE NOE
Talks to You about Her Kids
Always thought babies were dumb. Always did. Bald globey heads and gums dripping spit. Nothing behind the eyes but want. It made me belly-sick to see how they’d reach up for me, needing me to feed ‘em and change ’em and hold ‘em and hell sometimes just look at ’em. Babies want to be seen more than anything else on this earth. If they aren’t bein looked at they don’t exist.
Richard farted on his father within the first minute he was born. The whole room heard it, that loud angry gas, Richard announcing hisself in the ugliest of ways, then getting scared I guess and bursting into a cat’s wail, the doctor laughing, laughing, saying Well I guess there’s no doubt about air in those lungs. Art bent to kiss me and I could smell the baby, could smell the fart, and I turned my face so I could gag into the pillow. At one month Richard died. I told the doctor how I believed a fart got trapped and went back up the other way and into his heart where it all exploded. I cried but I don’t remember feeling the need.
Elizabeth was a sloppy eater. She slurped at the breast. And me and Art called her Grabbin Hands because any time she got anywhere near my chest she’d be tryin to latch, even if I had on a sweater, she’d be suckin away, coughin up threads and cat hairs. It disgusted me, how desperate she’d get to feed, but Art thought it was cute. Elizabeth died at five months. She was much stronger than Richard, I remember, but maybe she choked on a lint ball she thought was a nipple. Nobody’s fault.
I guess I should confess how I was always kinda scared of babies due to how selfish they were. That might help you to understand my thinkings. Babies would kill you to live.
Jacqueline screamed with her eyes wide open, looking straight at me. Like this. And when she slept she’d be chanting in a demon’s language. I planned on calling her Jackie, but she didn’t make it past ten days old.
Art says after Jacqueline we had a boy we named Arthur Jr., that he only lived five days. I suppose he’s right.
Constance was a moron. She never even opened her eyes, though Art swears she had one blue one and one brown one. By the time she was born I’d had a headache for two years straight, and the fact that she never made a sound, didn’t look at me, slept through the night, that weighed more on me than any kinda screaming she coulda done. Like her quiet was creating a noise louder than all the other babies combined. It split my ears. I’d pinch her till she’d cry to make up for it, and I guess that’s wrong. She was dead after 24 days. Art went downtown one night and got the word Constance tattooed on his upper arm and when he came home I told him what a idiot he was.
I knew Letitia was dead inside me for days before she was born, but I let her stay inside. That was one of the happiest times in my life, me and the baby sharing a death. When I think back on that time it’s all white, like I was livin in a white room with white curtains and the beach just the other side of the window. After the stillbirth I acted sad for Art’s sake. I pulled his head down over my heart and let him cry, and he promised to never reach for me in bed again, but I broke him down after a couple of years. I always liked being pregnant, it’s a woman’s duty.
The doctor asked me once, was there something about the dead children I wanted to confide. But I had disliked him ever since he ate a sandwich during one of my appointments, right there in the examining room, so I told him if I had anything to confide the only one who’d know was Art.
When I found out I was pregnant again, the doctor had me and Art come in for parenting classes, a bunch of nurses showing us how to hold the baby, how to burp the baby, how to make sure the baby isn’t being suffocated by something in its crib, how to keep the baby alive. Art was so serious, takin notes and askin questions. He was afraid of losin another child, but I don’t get afraid like that. Fear is for people who don’t take charge.
Mary Lee looked like my mother, and she cried all the time like my mother did too. I rubbed rum on my nipples at feeding time to calm her down because rum used to also settle my mother. Mary Lee died at nearly seven months. Then Life magazine did a story on Art’s and my bad luck at having kids, and everywhere we’d go people recognized us. Our favorite restaurant even gave us free dinners for a year. I had the steak every time we went, rare.
Theresa never even left the hospital. I don’t recall what she looked like. Art says she had a full head of hair, but I don’t remember seeing any baby like that come out of me. Anyway. She was alive for less time than it took for me to push her out.
The doctor got on me to stop procreating, to refuse Art in bed, but the doctor had it backwards. I wanted it more than the doctor knew, so bad it scared Art. One night he asked Is this normal? But if it wasn’t I didn’t care.
They kept Catherine at the hospital for a number of weeks, to make sure she wasn’t going to pass like the others I guess. Me and Art visited her once during that time but the drive was such a chore. When we picked her up the doctor held his hand over her forehead like a blessing and told me to call day or night. When I was a child my mother held my hand to the hot stove to teach me not to touch it ever again, and Catherine was such a willful child that I had to teach her the same lesson when she was just a
year. I guess I held it there for too long because she lost some skin, and then she quit breathing so me and Art drove her to the hospital and left her there a few days. My headaches were back for the first time since my time with Letitia, and Catherine talked so much, all of it gibberish, that I felt anger towards her, my own child. She was dead a few months after her first birthday, choked on one of Art’s dry cleaning bags, or it was crib death again, I don’t know.
The last child was Arthur Jr. Guess Art really wanted a Jr. I got to calling him Arty. I lost my uterus because of Arty. He was a fat baby, his eyes like dull buttons about to pop, and maybe that’s why my uterus ruptured, and maybe that’s why his heart failed him at six months, because it was already clogged with fat, useless. He made noises when he fed, moans of satisfaction, and even now I shudder to think about that.
I had ten children with Art, and ten children died. That’s nobody’s fault. Dead is dead. It was years ago. We have a rose garden. We have cats. Our staircase has seventeen steps. I have my hair washed and set every Tuesday. Those babies are in a graveyard Art and I drive by on the way to the grocery store. Tonight we’ll have meatloaf and corn on the cob. Richard Elizabeth Jacqueline. Arthur Jr. Constance Letitia. Mary Lee Theresa Catherine Arthur Jr. Two Arthur Jrs. See I think Art agrees with me. They weren’t any of em different from the others.
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