by Paula Bomer
“Well, believe it. Caroline’s an angry bitch. I can’t wait until this year’s over. I can’t wait to live with someone who knows how to properly wash their own damn laundry.” Shelley’s face was red. She was standing now. “You try living with her. She’s impossible. She’s dirty, she’s mean. She doesn’t know how to properly wipe her ass and everything smells like shit in here. She’s always fucking angry. You try it. Oh, and she’s not here today. She went home. Her mother came to get her. She won’t be back until next week.”
The semester was coming to an end. Tony broke up with Maggie, this time it seemed for good, although it wasn’t and it wouldn’t be for another year or so, not until many more breakups happened would it be for good. Maggie’s grades dropped. Most of her professors didn’t notice, but Anya did. At the year-end conference, Anya asked Maggie, “What’s going on, Maggie? You haven’t handed in your last paper. And the last in-class exam of yours was a bit of a disappointment. As you know, I gave you an A because there was nothing wrong with your exam, but it lacked that special brilliance you always deliver. You have such a gift, Maggie, do you know that? I hate to think you would squander it.” She looked at Maggie quizzically, but with some disappointment, some sternness. “A gift like yours is only something if you use it, otherwise you may as well not have it, and sadly, you can’t just give it to someone else, can you? Is reading to Caroline interfering with your work in any way? I wanted to ask how that was going. I think it’s so wonderful that you’re doing it.” Anya sat behind her desk, her elbows jutting out neatly, her slim, beautiful hands laying delicately on top of each other, the frizzy strands of her hair sparkling around her head. Suddenly, the late spring’s sun flowed in through a window behind the desk and flooded the room with warmth. Maggie flushed. Anya was looking straight at her, with concern. With a detached, professional concern, but with genuine concern.
“My boyfriend broke up with me,” Maggie sobbed, much to her shame. She put her head in her hands and cried noisily and wetly. How could it be? How could he not love her like she loved him? He told her, you’ll still be beautiful in your thirties. In your forties. You’ll be my beautiful wife. He had told her, his dick inside of her, still warm, we’ll have children together. Laying on top of her, his thin, small body barely covering her own, his head hanging down next to her ear, we’ll have six children. And grandchildren. He pulled out of her and it hurt. Not physically, but it hurt, left her empty. She wanted him inside her always. He stood, naked and so white before her, his black, Italian eyes staring straight into her. And she’d believed him. And she’d never, ever felt so loved, not even as a child. He loved her, in that moment. In that moment, he loved her for the rest of her life. And the next day, he wouldn’t return her phone call. Or the next. Or the next.
What more could he want, if she gave him everything? She let him fuck her in the ass. She let him have everything she had. She had ripped open her chest and delivered him her red, bleeding, pumping heart. And now, there was nothing left of her.
“Sorry about last week,” Caroline said the following week, upon Maggie’s arrival. “I should have called you. My mom had some time off and surprised me by coming down.”
“That’s alright.”
“I’m miserable to be back. I have to get rid of Shelley. She’s the goddamn devil. But the year is ending soon. I guess I should just wait it out. Do you have any roommates?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you like them?
“No, not really. But we all pay the rent on time. And we have a nice apartment for very little money so I can’t imagine any of us ever giving that up. But no, I don’t like them. They’re very spoiled.”
Caroline smiled, looking off into the center of the room. “I’m spoiled. My mother spoils me. She always did everything she could for me. She gave me everything I needed. She’d go to the end of the earth for me.”
“Yeah, but …”
“But I’m blind?”
Maggie was quiet for a moment. She hated when Caroline finished her sentences, like she had some kind of sixth sense. She’d hate living with Caroline, too, if that’s what Caroline was looking for. Suddenly, Maggie was scared. What if Caroline wanted to live with her? Never, thought Maggie, to her shame.
“Just yesterday, Shelley came in and I knew Michael was with her. I said hi to both of them and Shelley said, Michael’s not here. I said, yes he is. I heard four footsteps come in. Then they start fooling around. I can hear the slight rustling, you know? I can smell the mustiness of her cunt. So I start toward them. I was just so angry, you know. I wanted to pull them apart, rip them apart. And Shelley’s laughing, moving so quickly—Michael, too—that I can’t grab them. The whole time I was yelling, I know you’re here! I know what you are doing! And I was falling over the furniture, trying to grab them. They just laughed at me. And then they ran out.”
“That is so awful, Caroline.”
“Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Do your roommates do shit like that to you?”
“Well, not like that.” Maggie thought for a moment. “I have two roommates. I don’t really like them. But we’re not that nasty to each other, either. Listen, Caroline, I better start reading. It’s getting late.” She felt bad saying it. But it was true.
She read: “Although we usually fail to think of it in this way, the world around us today is just one of countless possible worlds. The millions of species of plants, animals, and insects we see around us are the expression of myriad interacting processes, including chance—perhaps especially chance. At any point in its prehistory, a species might just as easily have taken a different direction, given a slightly altered confluence of events, thus leaving today’s world a slightly different place.”
A year later, on a particularly freezing, windy day in March, Maggie was walking down Commonwealth Avenue toward a class that she didn’t really care about. She hadn’t mustered up the emotion to care about anthropology, or anything really, in quite some time at that point. Even Anya Lander held no power for Maggie. Anya! Who once meant so much to her. Who cared for her and seemed to lead the way for Maggie when she was a new student, a new person in Boston. Maggie saw Anya in class, a seminar on the history of science, but that was it. The wind blew viciously, cruelly, as if full of hate. Maggie wore red high heel boots and jeans and a short motorcycle jacket, the jacket that once belonged to Tony. Her head was uncovered and her thin, blonde hair whipped in the wind. She was shivering large, spastic shivers, her hands shoved deep in the cold animal hide of her coat. She was deeply hungover. She’d taken to getting very drunk and having sex with just about anybody, as many nights as she could.
Caroline came walking toward her, alone, tap tapping her cane, her face purple-red with the cold, and perhaps fear. Her coat was buttoned wrongly, as her shirts often were when Maggie read to her, now a year ago. They had not been in touch since then, even though Maggie had promised to stay in touch, to call or write letters that Caroline’s mother would then read to her. The wind blew fiercely and Caroline hovered, as if she were about to fall. It had been so long since Maggie had seen her. Maggie dug her chin down into her neck to brace herself against the wind, but it didn’t help. Nothing did.
This was her chance. As the two young women approached each other, a great gust of wind sang in Maggie’s ridiculously uncovered, raw ears. It was a searing noise, high-pitched and unearthly, like a band of desperate angels screeching to be heard. The noise penetrated the cold, superceded it, and gave Maggie a sharp, abrupt headache.
They were both alone, walking toward each other, in opposite directions. This was her chance to help a blind girl through an impossible day, through one moment of a horrible, horrible day. Or, Maggie could walk right by her, and Caroline would never know. Would she? Maggie slowed down, her mouth began to open. Caroline slowed down too, her eyes darting around, panicked and searching. Could she sense her, could Caroline sense her?
Once, when Maggie was still reading to Caroline, they went out for coffee. As Caroline and she left the room, instead of grabbing her cane that was propped against the door, she reached for Maggie. Maggie had stiffened. It shamed her that she stiffened, but she just did. It was involuntary. And then Caroline said, “People don’t want to help me because they think I don’t need it, or they think it’s condescending or something.” Maggie had felt that way, felt that it would be obsequious, or belittling, to offer to guide the girl. Caroline was so proud. So off-putting. “But I want the help. I want people to guide me sometimes. I want a break from trying, from being afraid of what’s out there, a break from all the things that want to hit me in the face. I’m alone in my world and I can’t see. I need help.” Maggie had loosened her arm by then, her initial stiffening giving way, and Caroline, sensing that, grabbed it all the more roughly. Maggie would do her best to guide her through the streets, but she worried. What if Caroline still bumped into something? What if Maggie didn’t guide her as smoothly as she should? What if a crack in the sidewalk made her trip, a crack Maggie didn’t see? It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. To Maggie, and to Caroline as well, thought Maggie, as the blind girl’s face was screwed up in disappointment and resentment already.
Maggie stepped toward the curb. Commonwealth Avenue was full of cars. She couldn’t cross. She couldn’t escape. She could only pass her, face her really, face her, but not, because Caroline couldn’t see Maggie. Digging her chin even deeper into the rough collar of her coat, she stomped by the blind girl.
It was the cold, thought Maggie, it was just too cold to be bothered with anyone, she told herself. But that wasn’t true, and she knew it. In that moment, she had passed up a gift. A chance, a real chance—to grow, to regain her love—it flew up in a mad gust of air and disappeared into the frigid and howling Boston sky.
• down the alley •
HER RIGHT NIPPLE BURST, POPPED OUT LIKE A TIGHT WAD OF BUBBLE GUM, A PINK SWELLING THAT FELT ITCHY. She scratched it relentlessly. She was a scratcher, a fidgeter, a pen chewer. She had two chicken pox scars on her forehead from six years ago.
“Don’t scratch! You’ll get scars,” her mother had warned, swatting her hand. Polly would run upstairs and crouch in a corner of her room and scratch and scratch until her forehead bled and she’d lick the warm, metallic blood off her fingers.
That was before she knew how to say “fuck you.” But by the time her nipple turned into a mosquito bite, she knew how to say it. It was early fall, and Polly had just started at Jefferson Junior High, one of five hundred seventh graders who roamed the halls in a din of shouts, constantly vigilant of getting tripped, smacked, or spit on. It was 1986, in South Bend, Indiana.
Polly was a skinny little white girl. Every day she learned new things at Jefferson. “Hey you little white bitch! Want to suck my dick?” said a big black boy, as he grabbed his crotch. He was probably fifteen, and the size of a grown man. This was in the yard, after lunch, in her first week. Jefferson was full of children who repeated grades numerous times. Later that day a girl told her, “You look at my man like that again, and …” The girl made a motion at her neck. Then she pulled out a pocket knife. “You get it?” The girl was white, but from a different part of town. Polly had no idea who her man was. Maybe the boy-man whose dick she didn’t want to suck.
The first time she told her mother to fuck off, her mother was sitting on the dirty blue velvet couch, reading the newspaper. Polly walked into the living room, excited. Her mother didn’t look up. There was a bottle of beer, open, mostly full, sweating on the table next to her.
“Fuck you!” Polly said, clenching and unclenching her fists.
Her mother looked up, alarmed, but without missing a beat, she whacked Polly across the face with the newspaper.
Polly ran. First she ran outside, into her backyard, and then she ran down the alley. At the end of the block, at the end of the alley, was a field. It was an empty corner lot, the only empty lot on the square block. All during her elementary school years the neighborhood kids played kickball, kick the can, and tag there, especially during the summers. They also climbed the boysenberry tree and ate its berries.
Polly climbed the tree. “Fuck you,” she said, picking the overly ripe berries still left on the branches at the end of September and eating them. Soon, she was calm, her lips and cheeks and fingers stained a gorgeous wash of purple.
“Your father’s a faggot.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that. This came from Michael Turley, who lived across the street from her. He was her age, a light-haired, thick-bodied boy she’d known since birth. She played with him often over the years. He was, in fact, her first sleepover. She remembered being able to take a bath with him; they were only five. It had been exciting in an innocent, five-year-old way, splashing around with a friend. A few years later, they had a day of playing gone bad.
“She showed me her butt,” he shrieked to his mother, pointing at Polly. Mrs. Turley didn’t do anything—she had five other kids to worry about—but after that Polly didn’t like to play with Michael. Yeah, she showed him her butt. How dare he tell on her.
Regardless, they were neighbors. It was Saturday. Another dreadful week at Jefferson was over, and the month of September marched on. She was sitting on her bike, bored. Michael had lazily crossed the street to say that to her. Polly stared at him.
“Fuck you,” she said and stuck out her middle finger.
“He’s a fag. That’s what my dad says. And you’re an ugly flat-chested bitch.”
Polly rode her bike down the street. The fire station, which sold candy as a sort of fundraising, was three blocks away, across from her old elementary school, and it was open for a couple of hours in the morning on Saturday as well as for an hour during the week after school let out. She rode slowly. It was a gorgeous day, sunny, the Midwestern sky flat and endless above her, clouds floating by like they had all the room in the world. When she got there she hollered up the stairs, up through where the poles came down through cut-out circles in the ceiling, “Candy Box!” Then she waited.
A fireman came down, keys clanging. His shirt, untucked, hung over his large belly. Polly’s eyes were focused on the metal locker, which was full of candy, but he grabbed her chin and she looked up at him.
“I bet you got candy in your box, little girl,” he said, and then he smiled, showing his red thick tongue between his teeth. His hand came out and tweaked her mosquito bite that pushed on her tight green T-shirt.
“Ouch,” she said, putting a hand over her nipple.
“Don’t like it? Wear a bra,” he said.
Then he opened the locker and in that moment, as the door swung open, everything that bothered Polly went away in a wash of color. There were Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Milky Ways, Snickers, penny gum, Twizzlers, Peppermint Patty’s, Jolly Ranchers, Mounds Bars, Mars Bars, Almond Joys, Paydays, and SweeTarts. There was everything a girl could want. She bought a pack of Twizzlers and rode over to McKinley’s playground. There were two black boys playing basketball and no one else. She parked her bike over by the hopscotch area and sat on some cement steps, carefully peeling one Twizzler off at a time. She gnawed away, happy to grind her jaw. Was her dad a fag? He was different. For instance, he didn’t have a job. Maybe that made him a fag. He was gentle, too. He wasn’t prone to smacking her across the face with newspapers.
A week later, her other nipple burst. She’d finally gotten used to the one little mosquito bite, had finally stopped scratching at it, and now this. In math class, she was going crazy with the need to scratch the shit out of it. She rubbed her notebook, hard and fast, over her chest. She was in the back row. John Bellini sat next to her, a short Italian boy from her part of town.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Polly stopped rubbing the notebook against her now burning burst nipple. Her face turned red from embarrassment, from exertion. “None of your business.”
“You’r
e disgusting.”
“Fuck you,” she said to him.
He looked her squarely in the eye. Then he spit, slowly, a large wad of spit onto the floor next to his desk. Polly then spit herself, an equally large wad next to her desk.
“I bet I can make a bigger pile of spit than you,” he said.
“Betcha,” she said.
In the weeks that followed, Polly and John continued their effort, every day a different puddle. Neither of them ever declared anyone a winner, but it made the time pass. Finally, the teacher, Mr. Rotterman, noticed.
“Hey! Hey! What’s going on there!” He was on them now, from the blackboard at the front of the class to the two of them in the back in a heartbeat, grabbing John by the arm and pulling him away. “Go to the principal’s office. Now,” he said. And then to Polly, “You. You I’ll talk to after class.”
The bell rang. Everyone left. The room seemed enormous, empty like that. Mr. Rotterman, from behind his desk, said, “Come here.”
Polly sat still.
“I said, come here.” His voice boomed across the room, echoing off the tiled floor, the empty white walls.
Polly stood up and then stood on her chair. She felt tall this way. She was tall this way. “No.”
“I don’t want to call your mother. But I will.”
Fuck you, Polly thought. Fuck you, she thought, hopping down from the chair, her feet thwacking the floor, like a capgun sounding off. She walked to the desk. She was wearing a pair of white corduroys, and they were too small. They crawled up the crack of her front and back. They also didn’t reach her shoes—floods, they called them. When she got to Mr. Rotterman’s desk, he grabbed her, quickly, and leaned her over the desk.
“That,” he said, as his hand slapped her ass hard, “is for being bad.”
“Bad, bad, bad,” he repeated as he spanked her over and over again.
