Joy nodded. “I know.”
“Maybe you’re not,” I said, though I didn’t know how that could be. I wasn’t having sex yet— just fingerfucking and messing around— but I knew how everything worked, and I felt scared for Joy. The idea of sex frightened me. Part of me couldn’t believe Joy was doing it already, and part of me wondered how she got unscared.
I sat with Joy until Miss Harvath blew her whistle for all of us to come out into the gym. I didn’t know what had made Joy tell me instead of one of her other friends, but I think it was this: whenever she talked to me, what ever it was about, I always listened with my whole self. Perhaps that sounds stupid, but I do not think it was. Think how seldom anyone listened to you when you were thirteen.
It turned out Joy was not pregnant. She and George waited for me outside the middle school one morning to tell me. George was old enough to drive, and he brought Joy in early to school. They both were waiting in the misty morning for me to come up walking.
“I got it,” she said. She was hanging on to George’s jacket, one of her hands digging down into his pocket.
“That’s good,” I said. “Now you don’t have to worry.”
Joy pushed George away from her then and told him, “Go on. Kiss her.”
George walked toward me, put his arms around me, and kissed me on the mouth. It caught me by surprise. I didn’t know why Joy wanted him to do it or why he would do such a thing— maybe because I knew so much about the two of them, or maybe because it was a dare. Or perhaps Joy wanted to prove something to him: that I wasn’t a snob, and that she could procure me for him. I didn’t know. I accepted the kiss.
Later on, when the two of them had some kind of fight, Joy made George call me on the phone to find out if she had been cheating or not. It was summer and I hadn’t seen Joy since school let out, but I knew what to say, and I believed it.
“No,” I said. “She would never cheat. She is the best person I know.”
“Never?” George asked.
“It’s you she loves.”
I was some kind of final witness, a barometer of truth.
When Joy and I got to high school, she was exploratory and I was college prep, so we didn’t have homeroom together anymore, and there was no class we had in common. Yet we continued to be friends, if distantly, and when some girls began to call my house, accusing me of everything from stuffing my bra to thinking I was better than everyone else, it was Joy I went to.
“Who do you think it is?” she asked me when I got done telling her what was going on.
“I know one of them is Cheryl Korr. But I always hear two voices on the phone.”
“It’s probably that Jane Zimmerman. What do they say to you?”
“They say, ‘We don’t like the way you act.’ ”
“They don’t even know you.”
“I don’t know how else I’m supposed to act. I’m just being myself.”
“Cheryl doesn’t have any guts anyway,” Joy said. “I’ll talk to them. Next time I see them in the bathroom.”
And I knew she had done it, because one afternoon Jane Zimmerman called, crying, saying she was sorry.
“I didn’t want to make those calls to you,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt you. It was Cheryl’s idea.”
No one called my house again.
The truth was I did think I was better than some people in my school. Certainly better than beefy Cheryl Korr. But I did not think I was better than everyone, and I did not think I was better than Joy. Which was why the next thing that happened bothered me so much, though I told myself it needn’t. No one else ever knew about it. It started with me and ended with me.
It happened one day in early spring of tenth grade. I was walking down the hall at school and saw Joy coming toward me. I don’t know if I noticed from a long way off , or if it took me a few seconds to see.
Months earlier, I’d gone through my closet to get together old clothes to sell at the thrift shop in town. One of the things I got rid of was a long-sleeved black shirt with a keyhole neckline. I loved the shirt in seventh grade, but once my breasts got bigger, my mother told me it looked obscene and I felt funny wearing it.
That was the shirt Joy was wearing this particular day. My old shirt. It still had the button at the keyhole neck sewn with white thread, the crummy fix-up job I’d done when I was too lazy to find a spool of black. The shirt was tight on Joy, too, but that was part of the way she dressed: low hip-hugger jeans and tight shirts.
I told myself she never would have bought the shirt if she remembered me wearing it in the seventh grade, if she had known it used to be mine. I told myself it didn’t really matter where people got their clothes from anyway. Still, I felt funny that the shirt made its way to her, that she was getting her clothing from the thrift shop on South Main.
“Hey, Suzanne,” Joy said when we drew near each other in the hall, while I was staring at that button with white thread. I could tell she’d seen me startle, but her face was not angry or embarrassed. Only puzzled.
“Hey, Joy,” I said back, and we kept on walking to get to class before the bell rang.
The night I was raped, my boyfriend Cree was doing one of his disappearing acts. He’d stood me up for a date earlier in the week— left me sitting on the front steps, looking up and down the street, waiting for his green car to come driving up. When he didn’t bother to even call to apologize, I told myself there were other places I could go for what he gave. I wasn’t the same girl I’d been in seventh grade: when Cree stood me up, I not only had hurt feelings, but I also had to suppress all the sexual imagining I’d been doing for days. I loved Cree’s body so much, and I liked all the places we had sex: an old mine road in Ravine; a meadow up on 895, where the Appalachian Trail ran; beside an abandoned farm-house in Deturksville, where we liked to take a blanket under the dogwoods. Sometimes, in the night air, dogwood petals would fall on us.
Keil Ward had wild blond hair and blue eyes that slanted up at the outsides— or maybe it was just his high cheekbones that made it seem that way. He was one of the men who flirted with me constantly when he saw me at the restaurant where I waited tables, and he always asked me to go out with him after I got off my shifts. This particular night, after Cree stood me up and a week before my seventeenth birthday, I finally said yes to him, and after my shift, it was Keil Ward who waited for me in the side hallway of the restaurant.
When we walked to his truck he slipped his arm around me, and it thrilled me— he smelled different from Cree, and he was taller and heavier. I wanted to know what it would be like to touch him. I wondered what his shoulders and chest would feel like when we embraced, and I wondered what his mouth tasted like. He kissed my hair as we were walking and it felt good to have him pay attention to me. I didn’t see the other person sitting in his truck until he opened the door. Then I saw.
“This is my friend Frank,” Keil told me. “You don’t mind if we drop him off , do you?”
I paused for one second and then Keil was lifting me into the truck and Frank L—— was reaching for me.
In truth, I didn’t know much about Frank L——. I knew his name and that he was the oldest in Joy’s family. He sat drinking every night at the bar of the restaurant, but he never talked to me. He looked a little like Joy, though I do not like to think of his face. He was twenty-seven, eleven years older than I was. Before he raped me, he kissed me and chewed at my pussy. Then he fucked me so hard he made small tears in my vagina, and the skin of my labia bruised and turned black. I don’t know if it would have made a difference to him if he knew I was a friend of his sister, if he would have gone through with it all.
Even though Keil Ward set the thing up, even though he was the one who tricked me, I never called him my rapist. He held me for Frank, pushed the hair from my face when Frank wanted to see— but he didn’t fuck me. He didn’t hurt my vagina. I sucked his cock while Frank was fucking me, but that didn’t hurt. Keil’s jeans smelled like bleach and his penis tas
ted like medicine. He was the one who helped me get dressed at the end.
In a couple days, it hurt to walk, and I knew I had to tell someone what had happened. So I talked to my French teacher and she took me to the hospital. That’s when I found out I had herpes and gonorrhea. But there was no gun, no knife. Just Frank L—— and his cock.
11
AS IT TURNED OUT, Breville was the one who smelled me that day at the prison. I didn’t get the letter for a couple of days, but the evening after our first visit, he wrote me, We’re deprived of smells in here, so maybe we’re more sensitive. All I know is that after you left I could still smell you on my clothes. I cannot tell you what it meant that you came to see me.
I hadn’t worn perfume, so Breville must have smelled the lotion I’d put on after my bath, or my shampoo, or their mix on my skin and hair. Or maybe he simply smelled the me-ness of me. All I knew was that I felt alarmed and self-conscious about the whole thing. It made me feel funny to know my scent had such a profound effect on Breville, but I knew most of what I was responding to was Breville’s bluntness: he had smelled me. What ever the smell had been composed of hardly mattered— the scent was mine, and Breville now knew that intimate thing about me. I felt embarrassed. Vulnerable. It reminded me of being in seventh grade and the first time I let my seventh-grade boyfriend work his fingers up into my vagina. Afterward, when we were walking out of the woods where we’d fooled around, he told me, “I can smell you on my fingers.” I thought it was bad that my vagina had a smell, but then I saw him keep finding ways to put his hand up to his face, and I didn’t worry so much.
After the initial panic I felt reading Breville’s letter, other thoughts began to surface. I’d been caught off guard by the intimacy of what he’d written— he had smelled me— but there was something forthright about the revelation. His words had a directness I hadn’t encountered on any number of dates with men who’d answered my ad: a young engineer who wanted a woman to spend time with him on his boat on Lake Minnetonka, and who was so lonely that the void in his life made his face tense and brooding; a gold trader who was smooth and amorous on the first date, pressing his erection into my belly upon saying goodnight, but who made excuses every time thereafter about why he couldn’t go to a museum or out to dinner with me; or even the grave digger, whom I actually met for coffee, and who appraised me by saying, “You look pretty good even if you do have a few miles on you.”
I told myself that if my scent had such a strong effect on Breville, it didn’t mean I was vulnerable, but rather that I had power. I had power over Breville not only because I could stop everything and never again come to Stillwater state prison to see him, but also because of what I represented. I was a conduit for the entire outside world, or at least the bits of it I could carry on my skin and clothing. I felt as though I embodied an entire sense, and the idea flattered me. I decided the next time I went to visit, I would wear perfume. I didn’t usually wear any fragrance in summer— I thought it was cloying in the heat— but I’d tolerate it for Breville and wear Saint Laurent’s Paris, sweet chemical rose. It would give Breville something special to smell, and I could hide behind the fragrance.
Perfume. Colored water in a bottle. It seemed like a small enough thing to do, to plan to give Breville a scent to smell. But of course it wasn’t. It meant something had changed between Breville and me, though it took me a couple of days to realize it.
His pleasure had become important to me.
12
NEXT WEEK when I drove the four hours down to the Cities from the cabin, I stopped at the rest area in Rogers and doused myself with perfume. When I walked into the visitors’ waiting room at Still-water, the scent was so heavy I was sure everyone would look at me as I passed by, but no one did. Each person in that room had his or her mind on private thoughts, I knew, but it soon became clear that I was not notable enough to draw anyone’s attention in that place. Though I couldn’t smell anything except Paris, I figured I wasn’t the only woman there wearing too much perfume, and as far as drawing attention— well, that honor went to a young woman with long, dark hair using what appeared to be a silver drum major’s baton as a cane. She wore a skimpy dress with spaghetti straps, and she had a rough, hacking cough that made her seem old, even though she was probably just twenty, or perhaps still in her teens. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw her, and I was so fascinated by her tubercular cough and the troubled craziness she projected that when she got up to go to the bathroom, I waited a few moments and then followed. She was already in a stall when I entered, so I stood fiddling with my hair until she exited. To wash her hands, she leaned her drum major’s baton against the wall, but before she could even get the faucet turned on, she had to hack into her fist.
“That’s some cough you have,” I said. “It sounds like it hurts.”
“I’d get better faster if I stopped smoking,” she told me, but I could tell from the way her voice sounded she didn’t want to speak to me, didn’t want to share a girls’ moment in the bathroom.
“It’s hard to quit,” I said, keeping on, in part because I wanted to go on looking at her.
“I’ve tried.”
I would have gone on staring at her, but she took her baton in hand and clumped and clicked out of the bathroom. I was left standing on my own in the cool green-tiled room, so I peed and took a while washing my hands so it wouldn’t seem as if I were following her. When I got out into the waiting room, I meant to listen to see what inmate name was called that would cause her to rise and walk to the guard’s station, but in the end I failed even to do that because I couldn’t keep the names straight as the intercom announced, “Visit for ——, visit for ——.” That’s the way the guards did it— they would call the name of the inmate or inmates who had visitors, not the visitors’ names. It protected the privacy of those in the waiting room and drew all attention to the men who were incarcerated. All I knew for certain was the young woman got called before the guards announced my “Visit for Breville,” and I watched her negotiate to have her drum major’s baton returned to her after she passed through the metal detector. What ever malady of ankle or foot she cited, requiring her to use a cane but still permitting her to wear high-heeled shoes, worked, and she tapped her way into the locked cage between the waiting room and the prison.
Watching all of that unfold, as well as observing all the wives and girlfriends waiting to see what ever incarcerated male they’d come to see, did something to me that day. I thought, You have become a joke, Suzanne, you have become like those women in supermarket magazines who fall for convicts, who have so few prospects that they pick a prison suitor. I felt so foolish I wondered if I should stand up and walk out of the huge wooden doors, more like doors to a church than a prison. But I did not get up and leave. That was another part of my foolishness. Still, I swore if I felt the same way at the end of the visit as I did at that moment, I would never come back to Stillwater state prison.
I was still thinking that and doubting myself and my actions as I passed through the locking cage door and walked toward Breville and the taped square where we could embrace in front of the guards. Because we had hugged goodbye at the end of the last visit, it seemed we had to again repeat the gesture to greet each other today, and when I touched Breville, it felt utterly false to me, and I wondered why I was doing it. Breville’s shoulders and back felt odd, rigid and unknown, and why wouldn’t they? He was an absolute stranger to me. But I couldn’t stop myself from making the gesture— I didn’t know how not to. And in those seconds when we were embracing, when my arms were around Breville so woodenly and his were around me, he said into my hair, on the side of me that faced away from the guards, “You smell so good. Jesus Christ, so sweet.”
And again I was disarmed.
Even though the feeling of falseness and rigidity was still there, even though I did not feel any natural warmth for Breville, I was glad I hadn’t resisted the embrace, insisting only on a handshake. A refusal like that would hav
e created an awkwardness that I didn’t want to put him or myself through.
And oddly, within seconds of taking our places in facing chairs at the end of two rows there in the visiting room of Stillwater state prison, things began to feel more normal. Maybe because the moment in front of the guards was over, maybe because we were able to walk together that short distance, to the end of the rows of chairs— I don’t know. I just know that as I sat down, the room began to feel familiar to me, and it began to feel ordinary to be sitting across the aisle from Breville with the spider plant again touching down on my hair if I shifted too far to the left. What ever hesitation and misgiving I had felt in the waiting room, and what-ever uneasiness I had felt when I was touching Breville— those things had all passed. And I think they passed because it became immediately clear to me how genuinely moved Breville was to see me. I couldn’t remember a time someone looked happier to be in my presence.
“Tell me what it’s called,” he said, leaning forward into the aisle, sitting on the edge of his chair.
“What what’s called?”
“Your perfume.”
“Paris,” I said.
“It’s nice,” he said. “It suits you.”
I nodded at that but didn’t say anything, and we sat there, not talking for a little while. Just looking across the aisle at each other, taking the other person in. And if you can believe that it felt natural to be sitting in a room with cages on the windows and being watched by any number of prison guards, then perhaps you will be able to understand when I say I felt some kind of pure happiness just then.
For most of the two-hour visit, Breville and I didn’t say anything of consequence, not about his crime or my rape. Instead we talked about places we had traveled and adventures we’d had. He couldn’t believe I’d been to Kadoka, that I’d spent a night in Interior, South Dakota, that I’d eaten shrimp at the same fry shack where he’d had many dinners in the summers, or that I knew exactly which Happy Chef Restaurant he’d bused tables at when he was fifteen and desperate for cash.
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