Barbara the Slut and Other People

by Lauren Holmes

  We are home and Jenna is walking in the house. Mike and I get into bed.

  Jenna gets into bed and takes her clothes off.

  Mike jumps up.

  “Fuck you,” he says. “Put your clothes back on.”

  Jenna cries. Mike leaves. Jenna puts her clothes on. Mike comes back and gets into the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” says Jenna. She is crying. “Thank you for sleeping in here with me. I think I would die if you didn’t.”

  There is a space between Mike and Jenna and I sleep in it.

  • • •

  “You should probably get out of here for a couple of days,” says Mike.

  “Where should I go?” says Jenna.

  “How could you move in here with me?” says Mike.

  “I’ll call my mom,” says Jenna. “Do you want me to take Princess with me?”

  “It’s better for her if she stays here,” says Mike. “She has obedience school.”

  Jenna leaves.

  Mike and I are in the car.

  We are at school.

  “Down,” says Mike. I lie down. I get a snack.

  “Stay,” says Mike. I stay. I get a snack.

  “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack. “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack. “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack. “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack. “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack. “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack. “Down.” Snack. “Stay.” Snack.

  “Okay, folks,” says Mo. “Before we leave, the tip of the day. This is for all of you whose dogs steal food. You make yourself a hamburger and put it down in the living room and you realize you forgot your beer and you go back to the kitchen and get it. When you come back, the hamburger is gone and your dog is licking his chops. If that happens to you, here’s what you do. You roll up a newspaper and you hit yourself in the head with it. Don’t be a moron and leave your hamburger alone with your dog. Because your dog is going to eat the hamburger.”

  Mike and I are in the car.

  “You know who’s a fucking hamburger?” says Mike. “Jenna is the fucking hamburger. I left her on the coffee table and Nick fucking ate her.”

  “Or maybe Nick is the hamburger and she ate him. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know which is worse.”

  • • •

  Mike and I are in the car. I am next to Mike.

  We have hot dogs. I eat one.

  “Jenna says that’s like a person eating half a dozen donuts. Ha.”

  We ride and ride. Mike opens the windows and I smell a million smells.

  We are at a new house. “This is your aunt Casey and your uncle Luis,” says Mike. Casey makes noises. Uncle Luis has hot dogs and I eat one. There is a small human girl named Patsy and a small human boy named T-Rex. They smell better than other humans.

  Patsy brushes me. “Pretty pretty Princess,” she says.

  “I thought she was my fucking Luis,” says Mike.

  “Language,” says Casey. “But you’ll find another Luis. One who isn’t a lying, cheating whore.”

  “She’s not a whore,” says Mike. “Don’t call her that.”

  T-Rex has many snacks. We eat them together. “This is a Teddy Graham,” he says, “this is a banana, this is blubbery yogurt, this is a Starburst.”

  “Aren’t you glad you didn’t ask her to marry you?” says Casey.

  “Maybe,” says Mike. “I don’t know.”

  Casey makes a noise. “God, I’m so allergic to her.”

  “I know,” says Mike, “I’m sorry. We’ll leave tomorrow. I was just going crazy there.”

  “I know,” says Casey. “It’s okay.”

  I sleep in a new bed with Mike.

  • • •

  We are home. Jenna is here. She is sad.

  Mike and I are not sad. I wag my tail.

  “I want to try to work it out,” says Mike.

  “Oh my god,” says Jenna. She squeezes Mike.

  We are in bed. Mike and Jenna move around. I close my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” says Mike.

  I get up and move to the space between them.

  • • •

  I sleep between the humans every night.

  • • •

  Jenna is gone. I am in the bed with Mike. His arms are around me. He squeezes me and unsqueezes me. I sigh a deep sigh and close my eyes.

  JERKS

  When I got into grad school, my boyfriend told me that we were at a crossroads and we needed to take stock of our relationship and decide whether to continue together or separately. While I tried to think of what to say, he explained that his vote was for separately.

  I quit my job and moved back to Massachusetts. I moved into my old bedroom at my dad’s house because I didn’t have time to find a summer job or a sublet. My dad felt bad for me and gave me a talk about how this was an opportunity to center myself. He said he would pay my expenses until I left for school in August, which was really nice and kind of depressing.

  The expenses he covered were: the minimum payment on my student loan bills, a monthly membership to a darkroom, unlimited film, and whatever I needed from the grocery store. What I wanted most from the grocery store was ice cream, but it turned out a person could not “need” sweets, or magazines, or makeup. I also wanted to buy breakup underwear, but I assumed that was not a need either.

  I wasn’t really thinking about when I was going to need the breakup underwear, but I wanted to have it on hand. Then the second week I was home, I went to the art supply store and ran into the boy I loved in high school, Silas. I wasn’t supposed to love him because my friend Kat loved him, so I loved him from far away like all of the other art girls and drama girls and drug girls. He was beautiful and brooding and he loved none of us back.

  I did get to hang out with Silas a couple of times in high school, but I didn’t think he knew who I was. Once, I went with Kat and two of our other friends to get weed from him, which was just an excuse for Kat to see him. Silas’s parents were out, and we stayed to smoke with him and two of his friends. Silas and Kat coupled up right away and the other guys checked us out. One chose one of my friends, and the other chose the other. I was pretty sure none of them even saw me there, especially not Silas.

  But when I saw him at the art store he said, “Deaf Girl!” and then, “Oh shit, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “It’s Jane.” Deaf Girl was my behind-the-back nickname in high school, even though I could hear fine with my hearing aids.

  Silas was working in the framing department and I needed mats cut. He hadn’t aged especially well—it looked like maybe he had moved on to harder drugs before eventually cleaning up—but my heart beat faster anyway. He seemed like he was doing fine now. I wondered if he thought I was doing fine. I hoped I looked like I was doing awesome.

  Silas cut my mats for free and said it was about to be his lunch break, and asked if I wanted to get burritos across the street. I didn’t have any cash, but he said it was his treat. We didn’t have a lot to say to each other and I was preoccupied by my bare legs sticking to the booth, but my heart didn’t stop its beating and I agreed to go to a party with him later that week.

  When we had sex it was urgent. He held my hand at the party and started sucking on my fingers in the car, and by the time we got upstairs to his apartment I was hotter and wetter than I had ever been. Later I wondered if it was the kind of sex you could only have if you had been waiting for it since high school. Obviously Silas hadn’t been waiting for it since high school, but he knew how to make it seem like he had been.

  I started going to Silas’s apartment almost every night. He only had a couch, a TV, and a bed, but it was clean and I liked it there. I couldn’t explain it, but all I wanted to do was be in his bed and let him do whatever he wanted to me. Maybe I could have explained it through the high school crush, or through the getting dumped, but it seemed like it was more, or maybe less, than that. Like a purely and exceptionally physical thing.

  • • •<
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  In July my dad’s girlfriend asked me if I wanted to babysit for her coworker’s kid. I didn’t. I had promised myself I would never babysit again, three separate times: once when I graduated from high school, once when I graduated from college, and then again three months after that, after I spent the summer babysitting. I meant it every time, but I really meant it the last time. At the end of that summer I had a meeting with myself and told myself it was time to be an adult.

  And now it was almost two years after that last promise, and I had spent the past eight weeks living at home, asking my dad for cash and having him ask me if all the time I was spending at Silas’s apartment was really helping me center myself. So it was hard to turn down the babysitting job.

  And when I hesitated, my dad’s girlfriend smacked her forehead and said, “Oh my god, I can’t believe I forgot! The kid is hearing impaired!”

  “Oh,” I said. “Great.” I still didn’t want to do it but I wondered if that meant I should. It did seem like a big coincidence, and my dad’s girlfriend seemed to think it was some kind of fate. Maybe I was supposed to meet the kid and be his hearing-impaired role model or something. Show him that I turned out fine, awesome. If that was the case, I guessed the babysitting wouldn’t kill me.

  That weekend I went to meet them. The mom, Susanna, let me in, and said the kid was still sleeping. There didn’t seem to be a dad there. The mom was older than I expected, maybe mid-forties, and she wasn’t unpretty but she looked kind of spent. Their apartment was the first floor of a small house. She led me through the hall and the kitchen and out to the back porch. She brought me a glass of water.

  “I can’t believe you’re hearing impaired,” she said. “I wouldn’t have known on the phone.”

  “I do pretty well,” I said.

  “Your speech is almost totally normal,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Timmy and I are so excited to have a hearing-impaired babysitter.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So, you’re just in the area for the summer?”

  “Yeah, I’m going back to school in the fall.”

  She didn’t ask for what, and I didn’t tell her. Whenever I tell people I take pictures, they say they do too, and want to show me the same picture that everybody has of whatever bridge in Venice. Either that or they try to hire me for their sister’s stepkid’s wedding, and I have to explain that I don’t do weddings, like I’m too good for them or something. I actually think I’m not good enough for weddings—there are too many people, and everything happens so fast.

  Susanna told me the kid’s whole story—he was born completely deaf, and they didn’t think he would ever hear or speak. The doctors said the cochlear implant was their only chance, so they got on the waiting list for the surgery, and when he was two they got a call that someone had canceled and they could have the spot if they brought him in the next day. He got the implant, and now he was eight and doing well. He went to a regular school where his teachers wore microphones that fed into his device, and he went to speech therapy. Susanna said he was easy to understand once you knew him, but she was hoping his speech would get better with the therapy. She went in and got his device to show me. It magnetically attached to his implant, which was under his skin.

  Then she asked if I had always been hearing impaired and I gave her my deaf history. My parents realized something was wrong when I started answering the phone, and I would hold it up to my right ear and immediately switch it to my left ear. We went to a million hearing doctors but no one could diagnose me. Finally they took me to Boston, to the fanciest ear doctor. He said that some tubes in my ears were bigger than they were supposed to be. I had most of my hearing in my left ear, but was legally deaf in my right ear. I got hearing aids, and when I was a teenager the doctors wanted me to try an implant. Not a cochlear implant but a bone-anchored hearing aid, which was what it sounded like—a hearing aid that snapped on to a screw that was anchored in the skull. I didn’t tell Susanna or anybody else that when I imagined the screw in my skull and the snapping and unsnapping, I felt a charge run through all of my bones. I stuck with the regular hearing aids, and now I had fancy ones that were wireless.

  Then the kid came out to the porch. He was only wearing underwear, and when he saw me he turned around and went back inside. He came back out with a T-shirt on, but still no pants. He didn’t look at me. He was scowling, but he had a sweet face under his long blond hair. His mom grabbed his hand and said, “This is Jane.” He looked at me for a second.

  “This is Timmy,” she said to me. She offered him his hearing aids but he shook his head.

  “Maybe show him yours?” she said.

  I removed my hearing aids and held them out to him, but he didn’t look at them or at me. He went out to the backyard.

  “Oh well,” Susanna said. “Maybe later.”

  We watched him walk around the backyard and look at things, and Susanna tried to introduce me to him one more time, by yelling at him from the porch. I thought he was straight-up deaf without the hearing aids attached to his implant. Maybe he wasn’t. But in my experience, hearing people never really believed that you couldn’t hear them, even or maybe especially if they were your parents. Either way, there was no response from Timmy.

  “He’s just shy,” said Susanna.

  “No problem,” I said.

  On the way out she asked me what my rate was, and I told her I made eighteen at my last babysitting job. She looked surprised and said she paid twelve, which she thought was pretty generous for one kid. She looked like she was doing the best she could, and I didn’t have any other job offers, so I said twelve was okay.

  When I picked Timmy up from summer school later that week he seemed perfectly happy to leave with me. I asked him if he remembered me and he said yes. His speech wasn’t that different from any other eight-year-old boy’s. I asked him about his day, and he said it was fine. He didn’t do anything fun and he didn’t have a favorite subject. When we got to the apartment he let us in with the key in his backpack. I followed him into the dining room and was kind of shocked at how much of a mess it was. The table was covered with papers, and the floor was covered with more papers and magazines and toys. Next to the dining room was the living room, which I also hadn’t seen on Saturday, and it was even worse. The toys spilled over from the dining room, the couch cushions were on the floor, and in the window one side of the curtain rod had fallen and the curtain was bunched up on the lower end. In the dining room, Timmy had made a beeline for a laptop on the table and was sitting on top of a pile of clothes in a chair.

  “Are you allowed to use that computer?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Timmy. “Of course I am.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m just going to check with your mom.”

  I texted her, and she texted back saying it was okay but he needed to do his homework first. I asked what his homework was, and she said he would know and he would tell me.

  “Okay, Timmy,” I said. “Your mom says you can use the computer but you have to do your homework first.”

  “No!” he said.

  “What’s your homework?” I said.

  “I don’t know!” He continued playing.

  I reached toward the computer, but Timmy slammed it shut before I touched it. He ran into the living room and threw himself onto the cushionless couch.

  “I hate you!” he yelled. “You’re a jerk!”

  “You can’t talk to me like that,” I said.

  He turned the TV on.

  “Timmy. Turn it off.”

  “I hate you!” he yelled.

  He alternated between telling me that he hated me and calling me a jerk for the next hour. I got him to turn off the TV but he wouldn’t move from the couch. For a while I sat in the dining room, getting a headache from the yelling, and wondering when he was going to wear himself out. Finally I made him a snack of peanut butter on crackers and brought it to him. He was quiet when he was eatin
g, and I took the opportunity to suggest that when he was done we could start his homework. He told me I was a big jerk, but when he was done he came back into the dining room and sat down and opened his math book. He completed one page and said, “That’s enough.” I texted his mom again, and she texted back that the assignment sheet was on the table. I went through the piles of papers until I found it. I told him he had to do two pages of math and four pages of his reading workbook and he said, “See, I told you you were wrong.” But he did the pages, and when he was done he called me a jerk again and we went to the playground.

  When we got there he ran around like crazy. I offered to play with him but he didn’t want to play with me or any of the kids there. I sat on a bench with some moms and watched kids trip in a poorly placed water drainage ditch between the bench area and the rest of the playground. After half an hour Timmy came running up and said he needed to go to the bathroom. There were Porta-Pottys right there, but he insisted that we drive home. When we got there we couldn’t get in. Somehow the key didn’t work anymore. I tried every lock trick I knew, but I couldn’t get the door open.

  Timmy called me a stupid jerk and tried the lock himself. Then he said he didn’t need to use the bathroom anymore. He clearly did, so we drove to a pizza place, and then back to the playground. I texted Susanna to tell her we had locked ourselves out, and she said she would meet us at the playground.

  I watched Timmy play on a big round wheel. Other kids were sitting on top of it, and he was pushing it and then jumping onto it himself. It seemed dangerous but I was too exhausted to do anything about it, and if I had learned anything in my years of babysitting, it was that nothing was as dangerous as it seemed to me. All the times my heart had stopped had always been for nothing.

  So I watched him push the wheel with his strange intensity. He didn’t even seem to notice the other kids, and I wondered if he had a bigger problem than being deaf. I wondered if I could just tell Susanna that I wasn’t coming back tomorrow. I had never done anything like that, but I had also never been called a jerk for an entire afternoon. And it was becoming increasingly apparent that there was going to be no deaf mentor–deaf mentee relationship. Timmy was much deafer than I was, he was doing much better than I had, and he was a little asshole.