Short People (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Furst

  It will seem to Mary that she and Justin are in a world separate from that of the party, as if they are seeing their friends from a distance, as if high school’s meaningless, not worth her fear, not worth any consideration at all.

  When Stephanie sees her, she’ll tell Mary that she was worried she’d gotten lost or fallen, drunk, into the lake or, truthfully, that she’d had one of those panic attacks and was quivering under a tree somewhere.

  Mary will smile abstractly and say that she’s fine.

  Stephanie will go on and on about how she wishes Mary had let her know there was nothing to worry about. When she notices Justin standing there, her whole demeanor will suddenly change, and she’ll flash a fake smile and offer him and his friend Mike a ride home.

  Mary won’t pay much attention to any of this. The broad smile still on her face, she’ll gaze at everything glimmering under the lamp in the front yard, finding patterns in the minuscule grains of glass that seem to float in the paved driveway, virtually tasting the dew that clings in perfect circles—each one enclosing a tiny diamond of reflected light—to the grass.

  She’ll climb into the back seat, squeezing up close to Justin, who will put his arm around her shoulder.

  They’ll make out for a while, rubbing their cheeks together like seals, nibbling each other’s lips, brushing each other’s teeth with their tongues.

  They will giggle conspiratorially when—as the car bounces over potholes—they are jolted apart or their foreheads and noses bump together.

  As the car heads onto the better roads in town, Mary will let the rest of the world disappear completely. To her, the back seat of this Escort will be all there is, she and Justin, alone in a velvet-lined pocket. She’ll awkwardly shift her weight to one side and work her free hand gradually down Justin’s chest, finally resting it on his belt buckle. With just a tinge of trepidation, she’ll check to see how turned on he is.

  Leaving her hand on the bulge in his jeans, she will look into his eyes.

  She’ll think of all the things they didn’t do during those three weeks in January and wonder if the things they did do had meant anything to him. He said they did at the time. They had in-depth conversations about the difference between getting sexy with someone because you mean it and getting sexy with someone just because they’re there. They both agreed that it must feel different when you mean it, although neither had the experience to back up this conviction.

  Justin will scrunch up his nose and squint in a goofy way.

  She’ll wonder what Mariel Hemingway would do in this situation. She would be bold. She’d be scared, of course, but she’d still go where her emotions led her. That’s what it is to be sophisticated: to walk through the world like there are no rules holding you back.

  Still staring into his eyes, Mary will begin to move her fingers slowly up and down like a snake charmer.

  He’ll slide his own hand under hers and fidget with his belt. When he has it undone, he will unhook the top button of his jeans. He’ll stretch his hand up behind his head, then change his mind and brace it against the door, moving it every few seconds until finally—scrunching up his nose again—he’ll rub her cheek with his knuckles and hide his arm, up to the elbow, behind his back.

  She’ll finish unbuttoning his jeans for him. As she takes him out of his underwear, she’ll try to remember how they describe this in the tasteful “massage” books and how-to books on her parents’ bookshelf. She’ll look down as she begins to massage and tickle the length of his penis with her fingertips, and trying to invoke in her memory the illustrative line drawings of naked people with seven-ties haircuts, she’ll flick her finger back and forth across the tip like the wrong end of a magnet swinging in and out of his field of attraction.

  When she leans up to kiss him again, he will open his eyes and study her face through weighted lids. His pupils will be dilated, his irises almost not there. He’ll scrunch up his nose and roll his bloodshot eyes in self-mockery.

  Mariel Hemingway, Mary will wonder, how far would she go for love? She’ll twist her body around, bending at an uncomfortable angle, her elbow digging into his chest. She’ll take him into her mouth.

  He won’t moan. He won’t gasp. He won’t breathe heavily. She’ll have to crane her neck to see his face. He’ll bite his lip in an ecstatic grimace, then, once she’s turned back to his penis, he’ll gyrate his hips and run his fingers roughly through her hair. A few times she’ll gag and, trying to be subtle, pause and gulp down air and adjust her mouth.

  She’ll wonder where that feeling—the romance and soft light—went.

  When Justin abruptly pushes her away, she won’t know how much time has passed. The look on his face will be cruel and judgmental. The slight alcoholic buzz will be flushed from her blood by racing red cells that burn in her face like shame.

  As she slides across the cracked seat away from Justin, Mary will notice that his friend Mike is looking back at them, shaking his head. Stephanie will be driving intently, as if her peripheral vision has been forcibly blocked off.

  Justin will slip his underwear up and over his still-hard penis, quickly button his jeans and buckle his belt, then turn completely away from Mary to watch the street glide past out the window.

  They will drop Mary off first. Crawling out of the car, she’ll want to say goodbye to Stephanie, but the look she’ll receive as she opens her mouth will stop her. Stephanie will stare until Mary can’t bear it. Lowering her eyes to the curb at her feet, she’ll faintly hear Stephanie’s flat “Happy birthday” as the car rolls away down the street.

  Mary will watch them turn at the corner, then stare at the empty street. She’ll imagine what Justin is saying: “She wanted it.” But no, she doesn’t, she wants that other thing—the romance, all the gauzy, riled emotions she’s sure she would find if she were in Manhattan. She’ll look at her clothes and think, “This stupid Benetton sweater, it’s too big. This stupid shirt with its stupid fake-pearl buttons. And this stupid silk bra, and these stupid jeans—as if Guess even means anything.” She’ll feel more naked than if she actually were.

  But right now, Mary can’t decide what to wear. She wants to pick just the right thing. She wants to be someone—anyone—else tonight.

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  He’ll gag and heave, but his parents will force him, twice a day, to swallow, and eventually he’ll appear healed. It will feel like drowning, sinking and swimming, being pulled backward as if he were caught in a riptide, the weight pressing down and compounding despite his frenetic flipper kicks, his heart-shaped breaststrokes, his hyperactive thrashing. Then he’ll be under, the light refracting, the surface receding as his system fills up with Ritalin. The furrow of concentration concealing his sleeping mind will seem to his parents a vast improvement over unrelenting kinesis. He will bloat in all this water. His voice will not sound like his own. Through some hydraulic illusion, magnified by the ever-growing ocean between him and the self that’s submerged in this chemical saline, the world will appear to him boring, its edges dulled just like his. Without the sensory overload, the so-much-out-there, the awe-inspiring everything worthy of his fascination—when chasing a squirrel doesn’t lead within seconds to picking paint off a fence, maybe eating it, then digging for earthworms and making mud pies to throw at the squirrel from on top of the fence if he can get up there without falling and hurting himself, all performed at such a manic pace that the only thing that can keep up with him is the running “Mom, hey, look, Mom” monologue by which he narrates his ongoing adventures—with none of this worth the effort anymore if it means swimming impossibly against the undertow, he will be completely manageable. He’ll get used to it: this is the way life is supposed to be.

  MERCY FUCK

  She was barely into puberty when it started—twelve, she told me. One day she was playing Mommy at her Fisher Price stove in the basement, and the next she was in the living room doting on the men, fetching them beer, and she couldn’t fool anyone, no
t even her mother, into thinking she was still some innocent little girl. Or that’s what it felt like. Maybe there were a few interim years of sitcoms and soap operas, raspberry lip gloss and bubblegum eye shadow—she must have learned somewhere—but in her memory there is no transition: she was first one thing and then another, innocent and then experienced.

  I prodded her. “What do you mean? You were only twelve, you were still an innocent little girl.”

  “I’m only seventeen now, and am I an innocent little girl?”

  “I don’t know, are you?”

  She glared at me and popped her jaw.

  She wasn’t innocent. Not now, not when she was twelve. Naive, maybe, but no, not innocent. She blushed too darkly when her uncle said things—and not from embarrassment. Well, maybe the first time, but not after that. “You’ve got yourself a knockout, there, Teddy. I’ll tell you what, hey, if I were you, I’d keep her locked up until she’s twenty, thirty, forty-one. Until she’s an old bag like this one.” He slapped his wife’s ass as she walked by and was swatted away, his wife barely annoyed, as if he were a common fly. No, even at twelve, she liked the attention too much. She coveted it. She liked the thought that she might be a dream, a figure of beauty, floating like Mary the Mother of God far above the world of men, casting shame and neglect on the lumpy women they could actually get their hands on. The bawdy directness with which her uncle spoke of her, the implicit fear and explicit rancor that her overwhelming femininity provoked, were normally reserved for the women in beer commercials, the women in thongs and wet t-shirts who, on the posters and calendars hung in the basement, lounged on the roofs of cars, not the real, mango-shaped women who lived on her block. He said to her father, “You’re lucky I saw her when she popped out, or I might be tempted to forget she’s related,” but he was staring right at her, his eyes lazy under heavy red-rimmed lids, and she stared right back, locked eyes with him and thought for a moment about whether it was better to cross her arms in embarrassment or throw her fists on her hips, arch her back and show off what was growing so disconcertingly quickly between her shoulders. She chose to hide her new body, but still, her father had sensed the transformation and sent her off to change her clothes.

  “Where’d you get that halter top?” he asked. “I never gave my permission for a halter top. Go put on something floppy, a sweater, something.”

  “Dad, it’s summer.”

  “So?”

  “So . . .”

  “So nothing.” As she scrambled up the stairs, he slapped her ass just like his brother had her aunt’s.

  Later that night, the relatives gone, her father got lurchingly drunk. Big deal. What was news was what he did in the haze before he passed out.

  I was sick of this story. It was ruining the mood. We’d hooked up around eight and since then had been wandering all over town, visiting friends she just had to see. Boys, always boys. I didn’t know any of them. She lived in the next town over, smaller and less sophisticated than mine, though that wasn’t saying much, my town was all rust and dust itself.

  We hung around first in a damp, cluttered basement and swilled beer with three geeky kids who were playing nickel-ante high-low, anaconda, fuck your neighbor. They didn’t even bother to nod at us when we walked in, just kept playing, muttering about how much the party they weren’t invited to tonight sucked and how the people going were the same assholes they didn’t want to hang around with anyway, fabricating great tragedies in which those who slighted them now, while in high school, turned out to be failures once they were released to the real world, where nobody cared how well you could throw a football. They called each other dickweed, numb nuts, fucking mo-fo whenever a hand was won. She asked how to play a few of the games, five-card draw and the one where everyone got a single card, held it to his forehead, bet, then on the count of three, looked at it. They shrugged. Their leader—who had the balls to wear an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt over his Walk-a-Thon t-shirt—mumbled, “It’s complicated,” and glanced leerily at me, as he’d been doing since we’d arrived. We sat there in silence and watched them play until she finally announced, “Well, we’ve got to go to that party, so see ya.” They threw backhanded waves at her.

  Outside, I asked, “What’s this party?”

  “It’s, you know, a party.”

  “Yeah, but do we really have to go?”

  “What else are we going to do?” she said.

  I chuckled awkwardly and didn’t push it.

  Then we wasted a half hour at Burger King so she could flirt with the pudgy kid working the cash register. His one eye was loose; no lie, he’d be looking at her with his good one and the other one would bob all over the place and creep up toward the ceiling. “When’s your break?” she purred. Leaning, arms crossed on the countertop, casually pushing her breasts together so they spilled slightly out of the rip at the top of her t-shirt. “I drove past your house this afternoon. Did you see me? You were out raking leaves. You didn’t see me. That’s okay.” Hands fluttering around his elbow. “I would’ve stopped, but I couldn’t. I had a . . . I was late for this thing.” Some customers came in, and he gave us free Mountain Dews, told us to wait, he’d meet us out back.

  I shuffled behind her into the parking lot and tried unsuccessfully to dream up an escapade compelling enough to transform the evening. I was insulted by how things were going; I had it all over each one of these guys, yet she fawned on them as if they were God’s gift and left me, in their presence, to lurk dumbly behind her without even an introduction. I was just a prop, a shadowy figure from a different world, trotted out to show the boys how desirable she was. Or—and I preferred to see it this way—I was the one she was trying to impress and make jealous. Keeping this in mind, I could observe her behavior with wry detachment, a condescending tolerance, secure in my own desirability, though I could not hide what I thought of the competition.

  “Hey, what’s with that guy’s eye?”

  “Leave him alone.”

  “I’m just curious. Is he . . . I mean, can he see out of it?”

  “He’s a sweet guy. I’ve known him since kindergarten.”

  “So what happened to his eye?”

  “It’s just like that.”

  “Touchy. You like him or something?”

  She popped her jaw and peered out from under lowered eyebrows. “He’s okay. I let him fuck me if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Which, of course, it was, though being told this information so matter-of-factly left me feeling cheated, duped, more by myself than her, like you feel when a con artist convinces you to empty your bank account and willingly hand over every cent, and you realize what kind of person that makes you and what kind of person it makes the con artist. I hid my shock behind what I hoped looked like earnest, empathetic curiosity. My arms hung limp and conspicuous at my sides.

  “You sound so bitter when you say that. Did you enjoy it, at least?”

  She shrugged. “It was over quick.”

  She toyed with the skintight bracelet around her wrist as if she were bored, but when she couldn’t separate the intertwined strands of plastic, rage suddenly jittered through her body. She ripped the bracelet from her arm, threw it to the blacktop, and ground it into the tarmac with the platform sole of her sneaker.

  I found myself actually caring about her. “So why do you hang out with him?”

  “Who, Stevie? He’s got the best weed in town, okay?”

  Stevie got us stoned behind the green dumpster. I braced myself against it with a stiff arm and watched them chatter while considering what I’d just learned about their relationship. He was the silent type, but she made up for this with stream-of-consciousness riffs, paraphrased from books she didn’t understand, I was sure, about what it means to be “fully alive, really alive, not like the fuck-alls in this town.” She touched him incessantly, but I noticed now that he was barely conscious of her attention. His good eye was as unfocused as his bad one; though he gazed vaguely at her, the iris was d
ilated and he twitched every time the lights of a car trolled past. She kissed him on the cheek as we were leaving. “You’re my hero, Stevie. You’re going to call me tomorrow?” He shrugged and I doubted that he’d remember she existed by the time he got back to the cash register.

  I felt great affection and pity for her now. “What was that all about?” I asked.

  She ignored me.

  I took a risk. She was a few feet ahead of me, and I reached out and placed my hands on her shoulders, a simultaneously freewheeling and possessive gesture. She didn’t brush me off, but she also didn’t bend under my weight and invite a chin on the collar or an arm around the waist.

  “So,” I said, “what’s the deal with that Stevie guy?”

  “You were there.”

  “I couldn’t follow it. I need a context.”

  “I’ll tell you if you let go of me.”

  I loosened my grip slightly and she spun and ran giggling to the car.

  Instead of chasing after her, I flicked my shoulders like I was stretching, working out a knot. I cracked my neck. I continued slowly, as if I were cool and unrattled, to the driver’s-side door, where I pulled my keys from my pocket, spinning the ring on my index finger so they slapped clicking into my palm, and unlocked the doors, all the while staring into her eyes—intensely I thought— trying to force on her the understanding that I was more serious and dangerous than her stoner playmates, that I was humoring her with my time, not vice versa.

  “You fail,” she said, hopping into the car.

  “At what?”

  “You just fail.” She flicked on the radio and scanned the stations, giving each song half a second, two or three notes, before rejecting it with a grimace or sigh.

  “Okay, fine, I fail, but at what?”

  “If I have to tell you, you really fail.” She continued scanning the stations until they began to repeat, and then she flopped in disgust back in her seat.