Affection

by Krissy Kneen

  There were whispers about the photograph before anyone had seen it. Apparently the red-haired boy had it in his bag, a photograph of a woman with a carrot in her vagina. I lay on a towel in the sun and thought about how it would be to put a carrot in my vagina. I thought about the candles I sometimes smuggled into my bedroom and used late at night. I knew a carrot would be essentially the same, but somehow the idea of a vegetable inserted into someone’s vagina played on my mind.

  I thought that if there was a photo, there would have to have been a photographer. Someone watching the woman insert the carrot into her vagina. I wondered if she had gone into the next room, like an artist’s model, and emerged with the carrot inserted, removing the light cotton sheet from around her shoulders, then lying or sitting on the divan with the carrot neatly in place.

  My race was next. I had never been in a race before. I had never worn my swimsuit in front of my peers. I wondered suddenly if I should have signed up for the race at all. I still had the usual exemption note from my mother; would it be too late now to table it and have myself scratched?

  I was wondering this when someone brought me the photograph. Not a real photograph but a picture of one, torn from a magazine. Sepia. Old. It reminded me of the elegantly posed portraits of our great-grandmothers, only this grandmother was not wearing any clothes and there was a carrot in her vagina.

  I needed to take my school dress off. I was wearing my bathing suit underneath. Everybody else had already changed into their suits and lay in the lazy spread of the hot bleachers or flat on their backs with their knees spread to make an even tan.

  I could never lie like that.

  I folded the photograph into the novel that I had been reading, even though Wendy Jones was waiting to see it, and stashed it deep inside my schoolbag.

  I pulled the sack of check fabric over my head. The corner of it snagged on my glasses. New ones, pink government-issue glasses with little upward curls at each edge. In a few days I would lose them as I always did and it would be six months before I could get a new pair. I wondered when my mother would tire of replacing them. I folded them roughly and shoved them in beside my novel.

  I stood at the starting block. The other girls wore bikinis and had sleek flat chests and skinny hips. I was too round. I was aware of my new breasts, which were already so large that you could hold a pencil under them. I had read about this in someone’s magazine. Are my breasts too floppy? Answering the multiple-choice questions when no one was looking.

  I missed the starting gun but I plummeted anyway, a moment’s delay and then the fat slap of water, the bliss of submerged oblivion.

  I thought about the woman with the carrot in her vagina. Did the cameraman adjust the carrot, moving it a little this way or that, pushing or pulling? I wondered how these things could be orchestrated. I wondered if the woman had family, if she told her mother about the photographer, if she married him or perhaps had children with him. I wondered if the photographer might have been a woman. Would it be easier to have a woman moving your carrot a little farther in, a little farther out? I wondered about the hundreds of people who had seen this photograph since then. I thought about that woman with the carrot and her ability to bring a whole new generation of teenagers to orgasm.

  I saw the blue-tiled wall approaching. Half the race over. I kicked and my arms windmilled and I reached out for the tiles, felt them beneath my fingers, was about to turn and head for the finish line when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  I bobbed to the surface, panting. One of the teachers was leaning into the pool and tapping my head. There was a waterfall of hair in my eyes but I could see that there were no other swimmers in the pool. The others had finished their race. I was only halfway through.

  “I can finish,” I gasped. It was only another fifty meters.

  “They’re waiting to start the next race. You can get out at this end now. Better not hold the races up.”

  I nodded, ducked under the little colored floaties marking the lanes. I emerged from the pool in my one-piece swimsuit and everyone was watching me. I knew that I should be embarrassed, but I wasn’t. I sat with my towel and my schoolbag beside me and the photo of the woman with a carrot that I would sneak home and stash under my bed. I had just procured my first piece of pornography. There would be many more.

  COUNSELED

  Brisbane 2008

  “I think I have a sexual addiction.”

  She sits in a chair a long way away from mine. She has a pleasant face. I like her immediately. She seems intelligent, human. I can see myself being honest with her. I want to be honest. I am paying a lot of money to be honest with her.

  “Why is it you think that? How is this addiction expressed? ”

  We have an hour together. I wonder how it is possible to even scratch the surface of it in an hour. How to explain that I have built my life around sex; I think about it almost every waking moment.

  “I masturbate all the time,” I tell her, “I can’t survive a day without it.” I tell her how it eats into my time. When I am at home, struggling with my writing, I trawl for pornography on the Internet. I download free grabs, quick little shots of the stuff, consumed like amyl nitrate. The rush is instant and relieving. Once or twice I have been caught out by the postman or someone visiting, once at work I was discovered indulging in my fix in the upstairs office when I had arrived an hour early for my shift. None of this really bothers me. I have never let the sex distract me from my job; apart from a little awkwardness if I am ever interrupted, it is a relatively benign habit.

  “And then I sexualize everybody. I think about sleeping with them. There’s this thing I do where I pick someone as my friend and then I fall in love with them.” To date, however, I have not acted on any of these desires. They are all unrequited longings, fuel for the furtive moments of procrastination. If anything they only serve to augment the ever-satisfying marital bed. They are little forays into the unknown from which I slip back into the real world with small gems that I have picked up from my imaginary lovers. Sometimes I surprise my husband with my inventiveness. Eighteen years of marriage and the palette has only become richer.

  “Yes,” she says. “What about your husband?”

  My beautiful boy. My first impulse is to speak about my lust. The thought of him precipitates a surge in my groin. I can feel the drug of my desire shooting out into my brain, spreading its anemone fingers down into my spine. But it is more than lust.

  “He is family,” I tell her. “Familial love.”

  I don’t believe in romantic love, the neatness of the fairytale. I am certain the world is too chaotic to accommodate such an organized concept, but the idea of it is delicious. I want to tell her about Christopher, and the one before him, and the one that will be after. I want to impress her with my tap-and-bucket analogy. I want to tell her about my inability to separate my unconditional care from my lust, that ever-present engine that powers my body, keeping it on edge at the point of fight or flight. I want to tell her that even as I begin to feel this way, I am waiting for the moment when I will have no words and I will reach out to touch and be slapped back, laughed at, belittled.

  “I think I have a problem with intimacy,” I tell her; I see her glance at her watch. Almost time.

  “A problem?”

  That may in fact be an understatement.

  “You have a problem with intimacy, but you say you have no problem with sex?”

  “Oh no. No problem with sex. Sex is clean. Easy. Sex has nothing to do with intimacy.”

  She raises an eyebrow and I know the question already. I replay myself: sex has nothing to do with intimacy. I am certain that other people would disagree with me. She would disagree with me, but I know quite a bit about sex and I am certain that sex and intimacy are completely separate in the scheme of things.

  I walk back to the shop where Christopher has an armful of books for shelving. Customers glance toward me and I wonder if my little disclosures are written on my skin. I
notice how the rest of the staff are easy with each other. I notice how they give me space, careful not to brush by me, cautious, tiptoeing around me as if I were radioactive.

  I am twice their age. I am the old woman of the bookstore. I wonder what they think of my constantly crude conversation, my continuous sexualization of the warm bodies walking through the door. I wonder if they laugh about me after work when they gather to watch bands or drink beer. I wonder if I have become a joke, the aging sexpot from the bad seventies television shows. I wonder when I first realized that sex and intimacy are entirely different things.

  WINNING LOTTO

  Blacktown 1982

  On Wednesday evenings we watched the television. We never watched the news like the other kids at school. The news was “all wars and killing and hate.” We were allowed to watch family-friendly sitcoms, I Love Lucy and I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched, but the television would be turned off if Samantha kissed Darren for longer than her usual peck on the cheek. On Wednesday nights my grandmother put on her large-rimmed spectacles and settled with her calculator and her notepad and rows of complicated calculations.

  “I do my maths,” she said, the television flickering in the background, too low to hear the voices.

  She had devised a formula. On one side of the page she played this out, line after line of long division, multiplication, equations, substituting numbers for the letters that took their place at the top of the page. My aunt double-checked her addition using a calculator, duplicating the set of numbers, cross-checking. This seemed to be the work of hours, and the rest of us, the other three, were left to talk or to sit in the lounge chairs reading our books. I glanced up, wondering if I would be missed if I disappeared to the bathroom for a while. I had to pick my moments; perhaps it was too soon after the last trip. I decided I could wait it out. Maybe after the lotto was over, when everyone was getting ready for dinner.

  The woman on the television, too pretty to be beautiful, wore a big fake blond smile. The man had hair that might be molded plastic, too dark. The numbers fell, and the women ticked and clucked. When I was younger I had sacrificed my pocket money to the general lottery fund. From time to time there would be a win. I would have to choose between a brand new paperback from a proper, new bookshop or an animal, a pet of some kind. A string of doomed guinea pigs, rabbits, turtles, lizards, and fish ensued. I was determined. I continued to invest. But when Gruesome the ferret died, I decided the pleasure the animals brought did not justify the mourning period. I withdrew my financial support for the betting syndicate and saved my dollars, buying my own paperbacks at the secondhand bookshop whenever I had accrued enough.

  On this night I had no investment in the fall of the numbers. I glanced up now and then as my grandmother and aunt crowded around their little notebook. They were whispering, checking, flipping back and forth between pages, underlining their calculations. Another win, I suspected. Every week it seemed there was at least one game that came in a winner, twenty dollars here, fifty dollars there. They would earn their fortune one crisp new note at a time, except that they always invested more than was returned.

  When we win the lotto, they said, we will take holidays to Broadbeach every week. We will buy pretty dresses for you girls, new slacks for us. We will buy that crocodile skeleton in the shell shop at The Rocks. We will buy you the complete set of Ray Bradbury stories. We will move away from Blacktown and we’ll build a dream world, Xanadu, just like in the poem. A stately pleasure dome, caverns measureless to man, like Disneyland, only better. Much better than Disneyland because the papier-mâché models that we make are nicer. Roller coasters, haunted houses, a mirror maze, a gingerbread house, a forest of flowers big as trees, a forest of trees as small as flowers. There will be a little train running through it and all the children can sit on top of it and chug along through our wonderland.

  My grandmother watched Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory over and over on video. She called it Willy Wanker, and after my sister and I had exhausted our snickering over her mispronunciation, we would sit with her, watching as she paused the video, standing up close and leaning over the hulking screen of the old TV, pointing. A chocolate river, like that, only we could have lily pads for stepping-stones. We could put giant chocolate frogs, not chocolate, really, papier-mâché, but made to look like chocolate. What you think Sheila? When the lotto numbers fall for us—yes? And my aunt would nod, seriously considering the technicalities of this confectionous feat of engineering.

  But on this night there was a win, I was certain of it. There was a little electric thrill of excitement as they checked and double-checked the numbers. Even my mother had lifted herself out of her chair to join them. A win, definitely, and not just a twenty-dollar win. Maybe as much as five hundred dollars and perhaps we would put on our best clothes and get on the train and spend Sunday at The Rocks, picking through shelves of Sepik art, fossils buried in stone. If we had a win then there might be scones with jam and cream in some little backstreet courtyard café.

  “Did you win?”

  My aunt was quick to answer. “Not really.” Too quick.

  “We have to check it. A little win maybe.” I knew my grandmother was lying. When they had a little win she would stand up and cheer. She would gloat about the system she had developed, crank the handle on their little toy lotto wheel and let the balls fall into a neat row where she could count them. She would sit with my aunt for an hour after the lotto draw congratulating herself on her mathematical prowess, or, if there was no little win, she would check back through pages of calculations to see where they went wrong, adjusting their formula to make their chances of winning more solid.

  On this night they closed their lotto journal immediately. They sat in silence. My aunt inserted a cigarette into a spidery black cigarette holder as long as my hand and lit it. My grandmother lit her own smoke off her daughter’s and stuffed it into a shorter holder. My mother shook her lighter and found sparks three times before there was a flame. She puffed and I breathed in the sweet minty odor of her smoke.

  My mother couldn’t settle that night. She creaked back and forth in her lounge chair. My aunt and grandmother were surprisingly still, staring at the blank face of the television. I was not used to seeing my grandmother sit still for so long. It made me slightly nervous.

  “There is a little bit of crème de menthe,” my mother said, “left over from Christmas.”

  Crème de menthe. It wasn’t anyone’s birthday. It wasn’t Easter, they hadn’t just completed one of their displays for a council library. It was an ordinary weeknight and they were talking about crème de menthe.

  “Wendy! Please!” My grandmother chided as if she had suggested we all take off our clothes and run naked down Duckmallois Avenue.

  “Just a little glass.”

  My grandmother held up a stern finger. “If you feel like it still, tomorrow night, after—” she left space for an unspoken fragment of her sentence. The others nodded.

  I looked toward my sister. She was still scowling into her copy of The Fountainhead. She had heard the exchange but, unlike me, refused to be curious. Their business had nothing to do with her. She was an island separated from us by the bristling of her back.

  “All right,” my mother conceded. “Tomorrow night.”

  My grandmother warned, “It might be something wrong. A mistake.”

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!” My aunt glanced toward my sister and me, both of us pretending to be engrossed in our novels.

  “I’m not saying,” my grandmother said. “I just mean not to count your eggs.”

  “Chickens,” my aunt corrected her.

  Chickens, eggs, crème de menthe. This is how I came to realize that the win was not a little one at all. First-division lotto, which meant there was no trip to the rocks to buy Sepik art. There were no scones with strawberry jam. Instead there was a promise of something entirely more grand.

  “We are going to move to Dragonhall,” they told me. “But it is a secret. D
on’t tell them at school. If they know you are leaving they might stop caring about you in class. They might fail you because they are jealous. Don’t tell your teachers until we are all packed and ready to get on the plane.”

  “Where is Dragonhall?” I asked them.

  They pointed to the map, somewhere in Queensland, a place near the ocean, a fly-spot labeled Bororen with the blue of the sea less than a finger reach away.

  “This is our Disneyland,” my grandmother told me. “Dragonhall because my name, Dragitsa, means dragon.”

  “No,” Sheila corrected. “It means Charlotte, Lotty. A female version of Charles.”

  “Yes, Charlie; but it is also like a dragon, my family’s symbol had a dragon.”

  “A dragon on the top of it,” my aunt confirmed.

  “Dragon-hall. You want to go to Dragonhall?”

  Of course I wanted to go to Dragonhall. I wanted to go away from a school where I was harassed by older kids and abandoned by my sister. I wanted to stop being afraid that the man who raped a neighbor and carved his initials in her skin might climb in through my bedroom window and carve his name in me. I wanted to live in a place that was like Disneyland only better.

  I went to bed early and slept without the nightmares that always plagued me. Instead I dreamed of chocolate frogs, gingerbread forests, and measureless caverns dripping with stalactites. The promise of Dragonhall.

  THIS THING WITH PAUL 2

  Brisbane 2008

  Paul is there again. Most people put their own image on their Facebook page but he has a piece of art. A house, balanced on a mountainous peak, a wash of a storm brewing. I have come to associate the picture that stands in for him with pleasure. I smile when I see it and when I am anxious I close my eyes and there is his house behind them like a reassurance. I know it is silly, but I associate our chats with a feeling of contentment and his picture is enough to evoke this feeling. He chats to me about books and styles of writing.