Things to Make and Break

by May-Lan Tan

  “Cool,” Erin says, wriggling away and turning to face her. “But aww, that means we won’t get to hang out. I wish you worked around here, so I could come see you.”

  “It’s Jersey City, not the moon. But if you come, bring a book or something. I won’t have time to entertain you.”

  “Fine.” Erin sounds miffed.

  Jimmy hadn’t meant to be so peevish, but Erin just doesn’t get it. Work isn’t like school, where nothing is real and nothing you do has any effect on the world. People yell at Jimmy when she messes up. The chef threw a spatula at her head. Besides, she prefers working in the Heights, where hardly anyone from school ever comes in, and if they do they’re shopping with their mother or something, so it’s more humiliating for them.

  “Come for dinner sometime,” Jimmy says to make up. “It’s fancy. We have candles and stuff. Bring what’s-his-face.” Erin’s boyfriend is called Hayden Pipes. He goes to the Hudson School with all the other preppy dicks. Erin met him at church.

  “Oh!” Erin says. “I can’t believe I haven’t told you.”

  “What?”

  “We did it.”

  “What? When?”

  “Thursday.”

  “God,” Jimmy says. Of all the people in the world Erin could have given it up to, Hayden Pipes is the least deserving. Jimmy’s almost certain he plucks his eyebrows. “How am I supposed to cover for you if you don’t tell me when you’re seeing him?”

  “No, Thursday day,” Erin says. “I didn’t have to say where I was.”

  “In the daytime?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Gross.”

  “Why is it gross?”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “We’ve been hanging out all night.”

  “Only at the best gig in the world,” Erin says. “It’s not that big a deal. You’ll see. The earlier stuff changes you more. This is just one step further.”

  It’s annoying when Erin pretends to be all wise and womanly, but Jimmy wants information more than she wants to fight. “Did it hurt?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “A lot or just a little?”

  “A lot, kinda. I don’t know.” Erin was much more excited when she told Jimmy about sixty-nine.

  “Was there blood?”

  “Some.”

  “But did it feel good though?”

  “It was better when he ate me out.”

  “Will you do it again?”

  “Maybe not, if it was up to me. But it seems like once we’ve done it, then that’s what we’re doing, you know?”

  “Are you sure you didn’t get pregnant?”

  “Oh no,” Erin says, “he didn’t come inside me.”

  Jimmy’s face feels hot. “Outside? Everywhere, like in magazines? On your tits?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You liked that?”

  “Um, yeah. It’s kind of neat.”

  Jimmy doesn’t get it. He’s not even Erin’s type. He doesn’t have long hair or play the guitar. She realizes Erin is waiting for her to say something. “OK. I mean, it sounds great. Really.”

  “You sound mad.”

  Jimmy hadn’t thought she was mad, but as soon as Erin says that, she starts to feel furious. “Why would I be mad?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are, you’re totally losing your shit,” Erin says. It sounds like she’s smiling. “You’re jealous because I’m an adult, and you’re just—you’re scared.”

  “Give me a break,” Jimmy says. “You’re an adult? Because you fucked some idiotic guy?”

  “Hey,” Erin says. “Stop.”

  “I pay taxes. I’m buying a car. No one’s helping me. Your parents still give you pocket money.”

  “Why are we fighting about this?” Erin says.

  “We’re not.”

  “Oh, OK. We’re not.”

  The pitch of their voices hangs in the air, getting louder and louder in Jimmy’s head. She and Erin don’t argue very often, but when they do, it’s always on the phone or in the dark. It’s as if they can only hurt each other when they can’t see the other person’s face. In their friendship, Erin’s the leader. She’s the winner as well as the loser: she always has the last word in a fight, but she’s also the one who apologizes first, no matter who’s to blame. It feels like this time might be different.

  It seems very quiet. Jimmy turns over and sniffs Erin’s hair. Erin never snores and her breathing doesn’t change when she’s asleep, but you can always tell when she’s crashed by her scent, of baking bread. Jimmy rolls onto her back and pulls the covers up to her chin. She closes her eyes and pictures the hot magic of the candy-lit rock club, as cloudy as heaven.

  She dreams of a house in the desert. The scorched yellow grass pokes through her socks as she walks across the backyard, carrying a trash bag and rubbing it to get the layers to come apart. Shiny objects are scattered around the yard. She finds a pair of welding goggles and a set of pliers. A Bowie knife. It’s like a video game: she doesn’t have to pick them up, has only to walk nearby to absorb them. The items follow her, hovering at the border of her vision. At the edge of the yard is a big tree stump with a dead, wet squirrel lying on it, and a bucket of water with bits of fur floating on top.

  She puts on the goggles and tightens the strap. She flips the squirrel onto its stomach and makes an incision in its back. Hooking her index fingers into the slit, she yanks them apart so the skin tears all the way around. It’s in two pieces, like a shirt and pants. Her hands are slippery.

  With the pliers, she snaps the ankle and wrist bones and twists off the boy parts. She cuts around the wrists and neck and slips off the top half of the skin like a pullover with the head and the hands still attached. She swirls the knife in the bucket before sawing off the feet and the tail. When she tries to take off the pants, there are stringy bits at the bottom that she has to sever.

  She arranges the skinless body on the tree stump and wipes her goggles with her sleeve. Presses the tip of the knife against the pelvis and slides it up across the abdomen. At the bottom of the ribcage, she works the blade in deeper and slices to the throat. She opens the ribcage with her thumbs and gently scoops out the guts, careful not to squash the gall bladder. If it bursts, it will ruin the meat. Cutting out the heart and lungs before she pulls out the windpipe, she breaks the pelvis with the pliers, poking out the last of the innards and a few black pellets with her pinky.

  Her socks are bloody. She peels them off and drops them in the trash bag. She uncoils the garden hose and opens the faucet. It must be near noon; the house casts no shadow. She washes her hands and face and rinses the body. She can’t remember what time he said he wanted to eat. She shuts off the water and goes up the porch steps.

  His truck isn’t here. She opens the screen door and walks into the house. On TV is an advertisement for candy. A girl is eating it and laughing. Jimmy stares at the headless red body on the cutting board, trying to work out what day of the week it is. She chops off the arms and the legs and saws the torso in half. She arranges the pieces in a Pyrex dish and rifles through the drawers, looking for plastic wrap. She still has to clean up all that stuff in the yard. He hates to see a mess. She mixes salt and tap water in a glass and pours it over the meat. Do they have any buttermilk? When she opens the fridge, it’s crammed with Barbie dolls. Their hair is long and cold and shiny.

  She swallows, tasting seawater. The hot blue light of the clock punctures the darkness. She’s balled on her side with tears in her mouth, a scared, sick feeling twisting in her veins. Something about Erin’s radiating cottony warmth makes it worse. Jimmy gets up and tugs on her jeans, buttoning them as she slips out of the room. She pads through the dark, silent apartment and lets herself out. The lights on the landing flicker as she puts on her shoes. She hurries down the stairs and pushes open the heavy glass door, drops of water strung like neck
laces on the pane.

  The streets are black mirrors reflecting the burning shells of the sodium lamps, the buildings dark-eyed in the soft blond light. The night air touches her face as she turns the corner and walks toward the pier, and she tastes the smell of tin cans that comes, always, after rain.

  Transformer

  You’re new. You sit next to me in math. Mr. Chapman asks you why your homework’s so messy, why all the numbers are falling out of the squares. You say you live on a houseboat and the sea is choppy at night. You have thick, dark hair, and big hands. I picture you asleep, your bed rocking.

  People say the first one is the one you’ll love forever, so I pop my cherry with a Coke bottle before inviting myself over. I duck into your swaying cabin, its low ceiling lined with movie posters. We take gold sips from a silver flask and you bite your mouth and look at me. We dry hump to a documentary about Stonehenge.

  At the movies you slip me an E, and the taxi takes off like a plane. We drink the harbor lights and eat the salty air. The moon is a prince and our thoughts are sunbursts. As we glide through the streets, the city twists her body around us. She has peeling billboard skin and bamboo bones. Her eyes are scraped skies reflected in glass, her hair waving tendrils of factory smoke. The club is her neon-lit heart, throbbing music and color. Flames melt the ends of our straws and the bass makes our teeth crumble.

  In the multi story car park you spread your jacket beside a silver Jaguar. I lie down and pull my necklace to the side. You keep staring into my eyes, so I turn my head and look at a disc of oil pinned beneath a tire. With each passing car, an arm of light reaches under the chassis to clock me in the eyes and bands of color scroll across the oil. There’s a metal rod attached to your spine I can feel through your skin.

  Summer comes, and with it long afternoons on warm white sheets, memorizing your mouth. You touch my nipples as day squeezes through the blinds. I suck until your eyes change color. On the way to the beach your hair gets blonder. It feels waxy against my lips. We read to each other from a creased paperback, the pages thick and damp, our bodies sugared with sand. I wrap my legs around you in the water and when you get close, you pull out.

  On the red-eye, you smile and your teeth are smaller. You still smell like sunshiny hair. In the seat pockets in front of us are two versions of the same book. You don’t know that, since the alphabets are different. I decide not to tell you. You look at my mouth as you take off your tie and unfasten a button. Your thumbs are double-jointed and your nails mooned and shiny. When the lights go down, I touch your knee. You roll up your sleeves and lift the armrest, fitting your fingers inside me. The in-flight movie flickers in your eyes.

  You kneel on the quad. Your hair is longer and floppier. You tuck it behind your ears, opening your sketchbook to an eye that takes up the whole page. The lashes are lines from songs, written in cursive. I ask you for a tattoo. Your pen tickles my arm. I jog down the trail by flashlight. You’re waiting by the river, your cheeks creased from sleep. The ground is cold and lunar so we do it on all fours. You kiss my neck the whole time. Your mouth blazes like a sun.

  On the first night of Christmas vacation, I wake up in your sister’s room. I can smell something burning. I go to the kitchen. You’re back from basic training and you’re buttering toast. I picture you doing push-ups in mud, a boot on your shoulder. Your head’s shaved and it feels like emery paper. We get up from the floor, brushing off crumbs.

  We robodose at Disneyland, and you sit with your sister on the Peter Pan ride. Flying over the tiny lights of London, I see a miniature version of myself standing on a rooftop. We spend the whole afternoon on the Small World ride, singing at the top of our voices and thinking we’re actually in all of the places. You show me that the clouds look different in every country. The mysteries of the cosmos unfold in the Electrical Parade.

  I tiptoe down the hall. You take off your T-shirt and toss it over the lamp. You unbutton your jeans and throw me on the bed, going fast and deep. My eyes blink. You’ve gotten thicker. You drag me to the edge, where you hold my thighs and fuck me standing. I like the way your buckle hits my butt. When the weather warms, we start meeting by the river again. You have a new thing, cupping my ass in your hands and lifting me up to your mouth. We get stoned in a practice room and play the piano. The heat makes us slow. We lie on our backs, the boat tipping side to side, books splayed around us like spent lovers.

  At night, we climb the fence. Lost in the dark, we snap photos of the tombstones to illuminate them. The statues of angels and crosses glimmer in the flash. We’ve used up the film by the time we find the grave of the rock singer. We get on our knees and I pray my life won’t be ordinary, while you pray that yours will. You run your tongue down my stomach and I tug your hair that’s grown back thick and wiry. Sunlight slopes through the low windows of your cabin onto the dented sheets.

  The pictures come back beautiful. We go to the punk bar to score pills from the bouncer. We dance beneath a railway arch, alone with the universe in a smoke-marbled shaft of lilac light, our hearts flatlining with the breakdown, the drums repatterning our DNA. You skin up on the bed. We swap clothes and draw each other, passing the joint. Your shirt’s warm and sweaty and your stubble scrapes my lips. You have my dress on with the zip open at the back. I push it up your thighs. I take you out and swallow you whole. You want me on top, touching my tits. You’re a talker.

  I put a spliff in your mouth and light it. In the flare, your hair appears sun-kissed, your eyes more dilute. You slip your hand in my back pocket as we dance to the band. You give me a blowback. You pick the cinders off your tongue and tie my wrists to the bed frame. You live near the airport. I hear the scream of jet engines as you fuck me from behind. Your mouth and breasts brush my back and your bone is plastic. We draw each other in the bath. You have a black eye that requires a lot of shading.

  Your studio’s across the field and down the street from mine. It used to be a swimming pool, and the twinkling, hazy light bouncing off the tile makes it feel as if it’s still submerged. You paint from Polaroids, and when we kiss, you smell of turps. For Valentine’s we do trips with pink hearts. You’ve had your nipple pierced and the barbell clicks against my teeth. No matter how I try, I can’t make you come. I’m holding your hair so you can do a line, but you’re crying too hard.

  You stand by the bar, talking to me while I clean the coffee machine. It takes me a while to recognize you without the lectern. Your wife is tiny perfection and doesn’t move her hips when you fuck her next to me, but works her jaw, as if coaching a fussy eater. It’s her beauty versus my youth. We cancel each other out great.

  You’ve shaved your head again, and started playing the bass with an armful of tattoos. You’re enraged in a sexy sort of way, and you always want to do it doggy-style. It only bothers me because you have a dog. You want me to give up meat and milk. You take the rubber off without telling me. You tell me I’m too manufactured, whatever that means.

  You score pills in the back room and we leave the drinks thing early. You take me to a building you used to work in, and we ride a glass rocket to the roof. I look up into the night sky and see a huge Peter Pan galleon floating by. You drop the needle onto the record, and the bedroom starts spinning. We stretch out on the carpet and turn to each other, halo-eyed. When you touch me, your face is a perfect mash of sadness and bliss. I feel an unfamiliar ache.

  We move into an apartment overlooking a prison that’s concreted over, with pieces of glass jutting out. We drink Ricard on the balcony, in the sun. I press last number redial, and speak to quite a young-sounding prostitute who says she knows how to choke people. When I look out of the window, I think of a giant sleeping reptile with glittering scales. The pills are laced with acid that doesn’t hit until I’m coming down, watching your face as you fuck me. With every stroke, you turn into a different animal. Every animal you become is an animal you already are.

  The needle’s bouncing. I like its thumping heart, but you get up to change
the record. You say you’re a different person. I think you’re the same.

  Would Like to Meet

  It was eight-thirty and I was trying to close the shop, but people kept tapping on the windows and begging me to unlock the door. They made faces and mimed praying hands.

  I let them in, wondering what they could possibly need so much. It’s a gift shop; nothing there is life or death. They selected wine glasses, bricks of granular soap, and those snap-crotched leotards that babies wear.

  I scratched off the price stickers, stuck them to my arm, and wrapped the items. My fingertips were sweaty and the tissue paper stained them hot pink. The sticky tape split as I pulled it off the roll, and I’d needed to pee since the first flotilla of nine-to-fivers had stepped off the train. I crammed everything into crunchy, twine-handled paper bags and rang the prices off my arm, running payments on the card machine and feigning total interest in the pattern of the floor tile while people keyed their PINs.

  A businessman approached the till with a pair of earrings and a card with SORRY stamped across the front. I thought the quotes made it seem sarcastic, but retail’s all about keeping your mouth shut, like at Valentine’s, when it’s better not to mention that hearts signify vaginas. People lingered by the jewelry cabinets, hugging their purchases and stroking their lips. I swept the floor, trying to push them out with the power of thought. Someone drifted into the toiletries section to finger the bath bombs. People twirled the greeting-card racks.

  They kept coming. A woman clawed the glass like a hungry zombie. When I let her in, she phoned someone and started making her way around the shop, describing every item in slightly disparaging terms. When the other person didn’t approve of any of the suggestions, she started getting ratty. I hole-punched a sheaf of invoices and started filing them. The phone conversation ended in a row, and the woman stormed out. She left the door wide open and as I went to close it, another woman came running into the shop. She made a dash for the photo frames. I locked the door and did more paperwork. The metal claws of the files snapped shut. I opened the mail.