“What?” asks Eddie, looking down at her.
“Sorry?”
“Your lips were moving.”
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
“You’re not getting weird on me, Jen, are you?”
She doesn’t answer. Getting weird. Eddie’s words echo and bounce through her skull. She twists her neck once again, her cheek resting on the cool earth, and stares at the empty heart carved into the base of the tree. She imagines her own initials there, and then, like a stack of cards flipping through the wind, a hallucination, she sees the initials of every man who will ever become her lover. There are so many—perhaps dozens! More than she can possibly imagine. She is filled with the knowledge of what she does not know.
Eddie kisses her throat, his lips dry and papery, then jumps up and rummages for his briefs beneath a pile of fallen leaves. He looks down at Jennie and she squints at him, blinded by the sunlight behind his shoulder. From where she lies, he seems like a giant.
“I—I didn’t use anything, Eddie,” she falters.
He stumbles on one leg, awkward as he pulls on his underpants.
“What did you say?” he asks, stopping.
“I’m sorry—I didn’t use anything,” she says, this time with greater conviction.
“Jesus, Jennie!” He punches the air. “How could you—”
“I didn’t know.”
“But I thought you were—”
Tears stream down her face. The light, the woods are refracted, kaleidoscopic.
Eddie Fish’s face becomes a blur.
“You bitch!” she hears, as if from a great distance. He is walking away from her, heels crunching against the leaves. “If anything happens, it’s not my problem, do you hear me?”
Slowly, she gathers her things. She pulls her bra from the branch, stuffs her panties into her knapsack, buttons her blouse and yanks on her shorts. She sits back down against the tree and searches the ground for a sharp twig. When she finds it, she begins scratching her initials into the empty heart, digging deep into the bark. She works carefully, with the precision of an artist. She fills the whole perimeter, so there will be no room for anyone else.
For God’s Sake, Forgive Your Mother
BY DARCEY STEINKE
IN THE TAXI, on the way in from the airport, objects moving at her through the windshield had the ability to harm. The green shamrocks painted on the diner window, the Angelina billboard. She could handle artifice, third-rate holidays, giant stylized breasts. It was the everyday objects that hurt, the pay phones, the mailboxes, the 7-Eleven in the strip mall. Fuck them. Fuck the purple bougainvillea twining around the metal fence. She would put each blossom inside her mouth and chew. Fuck flowers. Fuck the moon, the stars. She hated the blue awning on a place called Communication Station. She hated anything that reminded her of that lovely internal configuration created by sex.
In the hotel room, absolutely everything a dull pink, she got out the tiny bottles of bourbon from the mini bar. Closing the curtains partway, she lay out over the bed. Planes, no bigger than floaters in the corners of her eye, moved across the column of sky between the drapes. She thought of the people on the planes reduced to dust motes, the middle-aged lady in the woolen suit. The new mother, her baby’s head tucked inside her shirt; the two of them smelling like sugary milk left over after cereal. Without an armature, her desire moved around the woods flinging a nightgown onto bushes, saplings, brambles. Spread over the arching branches of a thicket, the white material looked best. She thought of the last letter she sent him, each word like a day when it rained and she made soup and put on an extra sweater to warm herself.
Then she thought about the last time. How his room was slightly arrogant, with the fireplace, the leather reading chair, the strange print of a dock scene done in neon colors. It was a room from her parallel childhood, one her brother would have inhabited if she’d been a banker’s daughter instead of a minister’s. She walked over to look at the picture and he had come up behind her exactly as he had in the dream the night before. Turning her around, he kissed her first on the lips and then below the ear. She moved her hand up under his shirt, her palm resting on the slope of his back. Then came the whole economic system of skin against skin. Lips first, the nerves sending subtle charges down her chest out into her limbs. A sort of possession began, desire manifesting first in the touch of his fingertips and then in the proximity of big swatches of warm skin. Her favorite landmark: the moment before all hell broke loose, when he took off his glasses and set them carefully on the nightstand beside the bed.
All this was still pleasant to recount. The figurative confabulations were what pained her, the forms they had created in space. His body hanging over her, cock in her mouth, her finger up inside him. Her tongue ringing around that clenched circle of skin. Somewhere inside of him, there was an ancient Chinese city governed by a boy who was constantly fighting back death. Paper lanterns hung in the courtyard, brightest at twilight. There was a city inside of her too, but more like Baltimore than Peking. Vacant storefronts and a fat lady living over a convenience shop. She was anxious to fuck. And the fucking was very nice, especially the part when they were standing against the wall, she up on her tiptoes, him behind her, and then that moment he leaned over and kissed along the raised vertebrae of her spine.
The hole opened up. For a while she sated it with Caesar salads but then it demanded books of poetry in blank verse. She understood after a time that it would only be satisfied with sex soup. One wet pussy. One hard cock. And a bottle of black nail polish. But that recipe just made the longing worse, elemental to her now as the fallen light at the window, as the feel of her own palm against the bones in her hip.
Had she mentioned that the bed was king size? That its scale in proportion to her body was making her sick? And you should always think twice before slipping out of your skin. You hope it will be this great event, that congress will fill with democrats, that glamour will be unmasked as the fraud she really is. But in the end it’s so hard working with people, you want them all to like you and be happy but you get caught up in their frailties, and sometimes you can’t help becoming a conspirator in their gloomy conception of original sin.
Flight
BY ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL
MY FATHER HAS GOTTEN HIMSELF into some kind of trouble involving money and the law, and for the first time I can remember, I have a role in his life, that of confidant. We spend large chunks of the nighttime hours riding around town while he formulates his plans: compromise, counterattack—all depending on the fluctuations of his mood, which are extreme, from tears to rage and back again. I listen and egg him on toward the more fantastical choices—because at sixteen I’m not aware that they are fantastical, and because they give me the chance to go on more car rides. I am especially pleased when he decides that we are going to skip the country together. “Fuck ’em,” he says, his face a pale green in the light from the dashboard. “We’ll drive up to Canada, then fly to Israel. No extradition, immediate citizenship under the Law of Return.”
“When?” I ask.
“Tomorrow.”
But the next day he doesn’t show up. I talk to his answering machine, stare into his darkened windows, bang on the door. My valise feels like a ton of rocks in my hand, but I carry it all the way up the Avenue, to Violet’s house. Violet is the girl I have been—not dating—no, circling is the better word. I am, in general, a circler.
Violet and I sit on the couch in her basement, talking, but I can’t really listen because my brain is full of my father’s darkened windows—that blackness.
“Running away?” she asks, looking over at the valise in the corner.
“Moving in. Your parents won’t mind. Will they?”
“Funny,” she says, and I am caught off guard as she leans toward me. I see her face approaching mine, growing larger and larger till it fills my vision, and I smell the sweet scent of her, then I feel her lips against mine, a very light pressure, hardly more than a t
ingling in the skin. I almost draw back, not because I don’t want this but because it’s too much, too much and yet not enough.
“How’s that?” she whispers. I’m not sure if I actually hear her or am merely feeling her breath on my face, the shape of her words on my skin.
“Wow,” I say, a little drunk with the sensation.
She moves back to look at me and her eyes are huge with interest, a childlike curiosity at the effect of her experiment. She looks like a kid who’s just built something amazing with blocks that may tumble at any moment. “One more time,” she says.
We kiss again, her body against mine, her arms around my back. It is a strangely anchored feeling, like climbing a tree and coming to a fork in the branches, the kind that allows you to wedge yourself in and dangle your legs, suspended in air with no danger of falling. And yet it feels like falling too—falling without the pain of landing. My lips move but no words come out; I can hear the click of our mouths, the rhythmic huff of our breathing. “Umh,” she says, “mhrr,” and I know exactly what she means: bird, sky, branch, lips. I can feel her hand reaching under my shirt, palm against the skin of my back. Everywhere she touches tingles.
So this is getting laid. I am falling and I am in the tree, watching myself fall. My father is in Buffalo, carrying a tote bag full of money and a passport with a new name on it. He is eating room service with the TV on. He is in his big white Caddy, driving toward the Canadian border, Niagara Falls a silent roar beyond his window. The world is neither good nor bad but huge and a father can get lost in it.
“Stop,” she gasps, sitting upright. “Take this off.” She begins to work at the buttons of my shirt, fumbling. She looks a little cross-eyed, dazed, like someone coming out of a movie theater into daylight. The buttons come slowly, one after another, and then she is sitting with the shirt balled up in her hands, looking at me with that same expression of curiosity.
“Now you,” I say, and begin lifting the T-shirt over her head—to stop the staring, really. I see the white of her stomach, the black lace of a bra, the curve of her throat. And then her face again, smiling through a mess of hair.
“Scared yet?” she asks, brushing the hair from her eyes. It is my first indication that we’re playing chicken. She sits with her back straight and shoulders squared, clearly aware that of our mutual toplessness hers is the more powerful.
“No,” I lie.
“Well, then.” She lifts her hands to the black band of cloth between the lace cups of her bra, undoes the little hook that holds them together. “How about now?” she asks.
“Maybe.” I stare for a while trying to make the connection between all the pictures I’ve seen and these real things, Violet’s breasts. They are instantly familiar yet completely new too, and I feel as if I’ve been waiting for them a long, long time. I lean forward to touch a nipple with my lips. I can feel her hands in my hair. Her body sways and my mouth fills. My father is flying, eating packet after packet of peanuts, the tote bag sandwiched between his legs. He looks out the window and sees clouds reflecting pink and gold. He tells the woman next to him that he is a salesman, a sex therapist, a professional wrestler. The world is huge and anyone can get lost; it’s hard to fasten on.
“Oh,” says Violet, a sound of surprise. I take my mouth from her breast; the nipple glistens with saliva. I follow the space between her breasts to the top of her stomach, kissing, kissing to the rivulet of hairs down toward her belly button, the waist of her jeans. “Hey, that tickles.” She squirms free, gets up from the couch, stands over me, her hair in her eyes. I reach for the button of her pants, unzip her zipper, start pulling them down. Her body sways with my tugging. She watches with a distanced curiosity as her pants clear her hips, her thighs, bunch at her ankles. She is not wearing any underwear. “I’ll fall,” she says.
“I’ll catch you.”
I am down on my knees now, my hands on her hips, steadying her. I am face-to-face with the architecture of her pelvis, the tuft of hair that I have dreamt of and wondered about. Of course, of course, I tell myself, this is how it would have to be, this is how women are made. I look up at her face and see that her eyes are squeezed shut, as if it’s the scary part of a movie. I kiss the sharp edge of her hipbone, the shallow plane of her pelvis, the shaggy patch of hair. I follow the curve downward between her legs.
“No, don’t,” she says. “I’m serious, I’ll fall. Oh.”
The smell is rich and shocking, like the breath of a cave. I feel her sway over me like tall grass, her warm thighs pressed to my ears.
Once abandoned, you will always be a thrown-away thing. You will never be able to possess or hold, will never understand the rituals by which people bind themselves to others. Everything is as fluid as air or water; names are to be changed, money to be hidden. Doors give you an irresistible urge to leave, just for the feeling of leaving. And you watch for this same urge in others: the thinking ahead, the absent laugh, the counting of money. You know people have thoughts they don’t tell.
She sits down on the edge of the couch, a sticky look on her face as if she’s just woken up from a long sleep. She lifts her feet and I remove the bunched up pants from her ankles. “Your turn,” she says. “Stand.” I stand up and she unzips my zipper, begins to peel both pants and underwear down my legs. I am careful to pry off my shoes as she works, to step out of the pants when they reach my ankles—I am suddenly worried about looking ridiculous. But there is no helping it: I glance down at my sickly white legs, how they end in brown socks. It’s hard to imagine that they’re really mine, these limbs, that I stand on them. Is this getting laid, this nakedness? It’s like losing your body.
She holds me at the back of my thighs, then takes my penis in her mouth, so quickly that I’m barely aware of it happening. It’s not the sensation I expected, not explosive but gentle, like the pull of the water at the beach when it tugs the sand from between your toes. You want to follow, and you want to stay. “Not too much,” I hear myself mumble. “I want to take off my socks.”
“Leave them on,” she says. “They’re sexy.”
She laughs, lying down on the couch. It is an invitation and I follow, spreading myself on top of her, careful for the sharp points of elbows and knees. “I’ve never done this before,” I say.
“I know. You look like you’re in shock.”
“I just thought I should tell you.” The truth is that I am vaguely worried about hurting her somehow—or hurting myself.
“Don’t worry,” she says. And I try not to as she slips me inside herself with a single easy motion. But it’s a startling moment: suddenly my penis is gone and we are attached. I hesitate, rest my weight on her hips, then begin to move. I have to tell myself to move, actually; there’s nothing natural or automatic about it. It is awkward, awkward, like trying to write left-handed, but I find a rhythm of sorts, a careful bumpy rhythm, and things seem to be going okay. It’s a precarious, perched feeling, moving over Violet. I’m fucking, I tell myself, as if the word could sum up the mystery of this thing and of how I got here, naked on the couch with Violet. I’m fucking!
I must have said it out loud, because Violet laughs. “You are,” she says. “We are.” She has a look on her face as if she were standing at the prow of a ship, watching the sea come forward. Her hands are on my back and she rocks in time with my motion, lifting her knees in the air, breathing deeply. “Oh, yes. There. There. There.”
Where? I want to ask. We are moving somewhere separately together and I want to know. My father is in Tel Aviv, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea, shocked by the Middle Eastern sun. This strange place is the Homeland, and these are Jews, carrying guns, shouting at each other in a language, both soft and guttural, he can’t understand. His tote bag is almost empty now. Citizenship is automatic under the Law of Return, and it is this same law that brings him to the bench every day to watch the light burn on the water. He takes out his passport, just to check his name, his picture. It’s easy to mix up who you are and who y
ou’re trying to be. One slip and the mistake is made.
“That’s good,” says Violet. “Yes, there. Keep going.”
But I’ve gone too far already, past the stopping point, and when it is over I lie very still, my eyes closed, listening to her breathing— to the fact of her. I do not move because I can’t bring myself to uncouple.
When to Use
BY STACEY RICHTER
THE MOST OBVIOUS time is after menstruation. But you’ll want to use it other times as well—after nervous tension has left you not-so-fresh, to wash away contraceptive jellies or creams (check your contraceptive instructions first), after intercourse (of course, this product is only a cleanser, not a means of birth control), to flush away built-up secretions that cause odor or anytime you want to feel clean and refreshed. Remember, this product is to be used for hygiene; it is not recommended as a method of expressing regret for joyless or ill-advised sexual encounters. It is possible, even with repeated use, that some women may not feel clean and fresh. Certain somebodies may look at themselves in the mirror after proper use and notice a halo of taint, an aura of having been “ridden hard and put up wet.” If, for example, you’ve been doing it with a drifter in a parked car behind a bar, with your shoes up against the window, your pantyhose shackling your ankles and your bra pushed up into your armpits (and, furthermore, if you suspect there are a couple of guys standing in the parking lot, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and watching—and in your drunken state you like this), then this product may be ineffective, despite the light raspberry scent. We recommend you discontinue use entirely if overwhelming sensations of guilt and humiliation ensue when your regular boyfriend finds out. And why would he find out? Because everybody saw you either leaving, sucking face or actually doing it with the weird, over-tan guy with the tattooed forehead, and of course all the products in the world will not restore you to “clean” or “fresh.” A word about relief: This product does not support the idea of “do-overs,” as when playing pool and missing the ball entirely, in which case certain women feel the right to call out “do-over” and shoot again without penalty of any sort. We consider this cheating. Therefore, it doesn’t make it better if, on the night in question, your regular boyfriend was off “taking some time to think about things,” which means, as we’ve learned in earlier sets of instructions, that he’s off thinking about how badly he wants to dump you and start “seeing” one of your very stacked friends. Who knows? Maybe he would have stayed if you hadn’t drunkenly turned yourself over to the first unwashed mouth-breather who made suggestive comments about the shape of your ass. But it’s too late, there shall be no do-overs, and you’re destined to remain pathetic, manless and a known slut. You will be largely ignored by your social circle, with the exception of certain guys in shiny shirts who’ve begun to stare openly at your inadequate breasts. You may start to fantasize while walking or driving around, grief-struck and miserable, about a fresh, clean start where everything is suddenly crisp and blank, like bleached bed sheets, newly washed chalkboards, refinished floors—the ultimate do-over. These instructions have this to say about that wish: Ha! You should be so lucky. Let’s face facts, little lady. It’s girls like you who force us to include warnings like Do Not Administer Orally. We’re not going to let you out of this one that easy.
Full Frontal Fiction Page 5
