That night in the coop, I wanted to ask June more about her brother’s friend, but when I turned to look at her, I decided not to. If she wanted me to know more, she would tell me. But she didn’t say any more that night at Noecker’s. We kept on working silently for a while, then talked about other things at school. I never heard her talk about her brother’s friend again.
4
MY mom left my dad when I was in eleventh grade, not long after Three Mile Island blew. Even though I knew there was no connection between the two events, I kept thinking there was something in the air that made her go. A cloud of recognizing, a big mushroom of knowing my dad wasn’t going to change, ever.
“What did you guys fight about?” I’d asked when I saw her packing. It wasn’t the first time I’d watched her.
But then, instead of saying, “Your father does not believe I deserve a seventy-nine-cent lipstick,” or bitching about what time he came in the night before, my mother said, “It is never just one thing, Vangie.” When she said that, I knew she was really going and that nothing was going to change her mind. People do not usually wake up of a morning and decide to change the rest of their lives, but my mom did. A hole the size of Pennsylvania almost burned in the earth, and she never came back.
My mom gave me two gifts before she left for New Mexico. One gift was a little red jewelry box with a ballerina that sprang up when you opened the lid. It was the kind of jewelry box you gave a little girl, and my mom said she couldn’t resist getting it for me.
“You’ll always be my baby, Vangie. No matter how big you are or how old you get.”
She even got my name engraved on a gold plate in the front of the jewelry box. Evangeline Starr Raybuck.
The second gift was harder to figure. In the box was a little black nightgown with spaghetti straps and a band of lace under where my breasts would be. The thing even had matching panties.
“I wanted you to have something nice,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it. “Shouldn’t you be talking to me about being careful and not making the same mistakes you made?” I asked.
“I know you’re smart, honey. Even when you were in ninth grade you were smart.”
Which meant that she had found my birth control pills at some point, though she’d never said anything about them to me.
“So that’s why you never had that talk with me?” I said.
“That’s why. You’d already taken care of the problem.”
And it was true, because I’d known all the way back when I was thirteen that I wanted nothing to do with babies. Now that I was older I felt it even more strongly. I wanted to get my pussy eaten and fucked by Del. There wasn’t shit for my mom to tell me. I knew how not to get pregnant, I knew how to earn a wage, and I knew how to fuck. All my mom could do was give me a black nightie and wish me well.
My mom called a lot when she first moved, but the calls dwindled over time. She met an ex-Mormon in Albuquerque and fell in love with him and his adobe house. I understood. Her own life overtook her. I wanted my own life to overtake me. And it did. I guess I was a little out of control, though, what with smoking weed or drinking every night, speeding to go to school, and the double fucking.
My dad somehow knew something was going on. He showed up at the apartment at funny times—late at night or first thing in the morning—and asked me about four times if I wanted to go live with my mom.
“I’m saving up,” I said. “I’m getting my own place after graduation.”
“You always have family, Vangie. Remember that.”
Yeah right, I thought. After I moved into that kitchenette, Del and June became my family. I could tell June just about anything, and though I was fucking Del almost every day by then, it was more than just sex between us.
In spite of the fact that Del’s old man was as crazy as mine, and even though I knew I did not have to feel bad about my father in front of Del, I was embarrassed to have Del see certain things. One night he and I drove to my dad’s house after a date. My dad was playing father that week and wanted to know what time I was getting in, so after drinking and fucking in a field for three hours, Del and I went to my dad’s place so I could report in. When Del and I knocked, no one answered. The door was open, though, and when we stepped inside, there was my old man, passed out in a chair, the reek of alcohol strong in the room. It was a common enough sight to me, and I knew there was no waking him.
“Why doesn’t he go to bed?” Del said when we got into the kitchen.
“He’s always like that,” I said.
Del shook his head but did not say anything else. Neither did I. I didn’t bother to tell him about all the times I had found my father dead to the world. There was no point to telling such stories.
I wrote a note to my father that said, I was here, 12:30 a.m. Your daughter, Vangie, and made us walk out the back door.
Del did not make me talk about any of it. I did the same for him. I knew Del’s dad was a drinker, too, and that he sometimes beat Del and Del’s brother Frank—punched them hard in the face like he would grown men in a fight. But when I saw Del’s messed-up face, I didn’t ask him to talk about it, I just said, “Baby, can I hold you?”
With June, I still did not talk much about my dad, but when I did, she understood. Plus, I could tell her what was going on with Del and me. After June and I started fucking in the same car, we wrote a lot of notes back and forth, and they were all about sex. Neither one of us could stop thinking about it. We wrote about what we did the night before, and sometimes we played at writing outrageous stuff to each other, trying to shock, trying to be the raunchiest. Even though I never came when the four of us were together, I could write to June about coming, and I knew she knew what I meant. It was a relief and a thrill. Just that one little phrase, young and dumb and full of come, was enough to set off the shimmery, wet feeling in me.
Those last months of school, June stayed with me as much as she could. No one at her house seemed to care much what she did, and she knew I was lonely. Like any family, we got to have our little rituals. First we did our homework, because—surprise, surprise—we both liked getting good grades if it didn’t take too much effort, and after that, we had our nightly dope session.
I loved everything about dope. My small black pipe with the gold marijuana leaf painted on it, the big black water bong that June and I bought together, the little marijuana leaf earrings inlaid with turquoise that Del bought me. In my mind those things were on par with the blue-black hick-eys I wore like jewelry on my neck and breasts and thighs, or my birth control pills in their slim, pink vinyl pack. All of it was sexual. Almost every night June stayed over, we’d clean dope and roll up a bunch of joints for the next couple of days, and that was when we talked about sex. We discussed things like how the girl should move if she was on top (don’t kneel or squat, but sit right on the guy’s hips, your legs straight out by his chest), the best way to cover hickeys (a little bit of cover Cream and baby powder, but no big scarf tied around your neck), and what spotting was (when you were on the pill and started bleeding in the middle of the month and there was no problem but the blood scared the shit out of you).
One night when June and I were cleaning dope I said, “Even my tongue is sore.”
We each had a double album cover out on the table, the weed spread over the cardboard—seeds and stems off to one side, leaves to another. I always used Tanya Tucker’s TNT album, the one where the inside picture shows her holding a bunch of dynamite and wearing that red jumpsuit. I thought Tanya was all right. She was country, but she was wild and I liked her.
“Sometimes if Ray and I kiss too hard,” she said, “that little place under my tongue tears.”
I handed June a plastic bag to hold open for me and poured my cleaned pile of weed into it. I knew there were things June and I didn’t say to each other, and for a second the whole thing seemed too private to tell her. Then I thought, No, June’s your friend, you can tell her anything. So I said, “It’s no
t sore just from kissing.”
“What else are you guys doing?”
We’d already smoked one joint, but I still felt shy about saying the words. But somehow I wanted to say them to her. I wanted to tell her.
“Del likes when I slip my tongue in him.”
June did not say anything, and I felt like I went too far. So I did not look at her and kept my eyes instead on the weed and the seeds and stems in front of me.
“Do you like it?” she said after a bit.
“I like it,” I said.
“Ray wants me to do it to him, too. I guess the two of them are talking.”
“I guess,” I said.
“I haven’t done it yet, though.”
I remembered what she told me before about not knowing if she loved Ray or not. Even though she hadn’t said anything about that for a while, I didn’t think she’d much like licking his ass if she didn’t love him.
“It’s not like a blow job,” I said. “You’re really, really with someone when you do it.”
“But you like it.”
“I like to do it and I like to have it done.”
Even though she didn’t say anything else to me, I knew she understood that this was another thing I’d learned and needed her to know. That was the kind of friends we were.
5
THAT June, right before we graduated, Del’s mom and dad went away for a weekend for their anniversary. Del and his brother Frank divided up the nights to use the house. I wanted to stay the whole weekend, but Del didn’t want to be in the house with Frank around.
“Why not?”
“I hate that son of a bitch,” Del said. “I know he’s going to do something and I’ll get blamed for it.”
The two of them were always fighting. Del had four older brothers, but Frank was the only one still at home. He was a year older than Del, and even though Del was nineteen and too old to boss around, Frank still tried to do it. Their dad ran an auto salvage yard on top of his regular job, and a lot of the work of breaking down cars for parts fell to Frank and Del. The two of them were always fighting over who should do what. Other times, whatever fight one of them was having with the old man spilled over into a fight with the other brother. Del thought his brother was a liar who would say anything to get out of trouble or make things better for himself. He wouldn’t even call Frank by his name but referred to him as “you know who.” When he did that, I sometimes wanted to laugh, but then I’d see the look on Del’s face and I wouldn’t laugh.
“Why doesn’t he move out already?” I said, but Del didn’t answer me.
He said, “Just be ready on Saturday,” and I knew better than to make any suggestions.
ON THE big day, Del brought me out to the house around five, and we drank a six-pack and smoked cigarettes, right there in his mom’s kitchen with her embroidered tea towels all around. We could have gone upstairs to Dels bedroom as soon as I got in the house, but we didn’t. I think we were both trying to save that, because we knew we could fuck all night if we wanted, and because it was good just to be together in the house.
“I’m making a steak dinner for us,” he told me when we finished the six-pack. “We’ll eat up some of the old man’s goddamn steaks.”
I didn’t say anything when he told me what else he was making, which was baked potatoes, corn, and Tater Tots. They were his favorite foods, and it didn’t matter to him if they were all starches. He was cooking, and I was impressed by it. I liked sitting on the hard kitchen chair and watching him do stuff. He wore jeans but no shirt, and I knew that was for me. I loved to watch his heartbeat make his skin jump, there at the base of his neck, and I loved to kiss the heartbeat place and the hollows his collarbone made. But then, I loved everything about Del—the riot of his teeth and the smell of his mouth and the color of his balls.
Del did a good job cooking. Everything came out okay, and it was even done about the same time. Still, I had a hard time even putting away half of what he served me, and in the end I had to push back my plate with most of the food still on it.
“You have to eat more than that,” he said.
“If I wasn’t drinking maybe I could.”
“Girls are always like that. They hardly eat anything.”
“I ate. My jeans are already tight.”
“Give it here, then,” Del said, and reached across the table for my plate. “Take off your jeans if they’re too tight.”
“I’m just going to undo the top button.”
“Are you going to unzip them for me?” he said, and from the way he talked and the way he looked at me, I could tell it pleased him as much as it did me to be sitting at the table like that, me with my jeans open and him with his shirt off.
“Naw,” I said. “Finish your dinner.”
I watched him shovel the food in and he knew I was watching, so he made a purposeful show of it. He wasn’t rude—he just did everything in a way that would hold my eyes. He kept looking from the plate to me, and kept his eyes on me when he chewed and swallowed. I liked watching the muscles in his jaw and cheeks move, and I kept wondering if he had a hard-on, because I could already feel the fluttering starting inside me.
When he finished the last mouthful and laid the fork on the table, he said, “You’re dessert.”
“What about you?”
“I’m dessert, too,” he said, and put on a goofy grin. He looked like a crazy kid and he made me laugh.
When Del got up from the table then to put some of our dishes in the sink, I didn’t help him. Instead I went to stand in the back doorway. I stretched both my arms over my head and leaned the side of my face and one of my breasts against the wooden door frame. Even though I had never moved like that before, something in my body knew how to do it, and I could feel in the small of my back what I must look like with my ass jutting out like that.
When Del turned from the sink to get dishes he saw me. And he came to me, just the way my body knew he would.
He pressed along my ass and my thighs, and in a few seconds he unzipped and started poking and bumping against me. I let myself feel that for a while, then I unzipped my own jeans and pushed down my panties. I didn’t turn to see Del’s face—I just stood on my tiptoes so he could get in me.
We fucked in the door for a long time, and though my shirt was still on, I could feel the breeze coming through the screen on the wet place between my legs. Just when my feet and calves were starting to ache from standing on tiptoe, he pulled away and said, “Jesus, Vangie, let’s go upstairs.”
When I turned to look at him, I saw his cock slick with me. Maybe it was because we were inside a house instead of outside or in a car, but he looked like a stranger to me just then. In the dim kitchen—the room was lit only by the light above the stove—his face was filled with shadows. He looked angry. But I knew if I could see my own face it would be serious and intent, and I figured it was wanting that was changing Del’s face.
It didn’t embarrass me anymore to be the one on top for sixty-nine, so upstairs in Del’s room I spread my cunt open over Del’s mouth and face. The more he licked me, the better it felt to have something in my mouth to suck on, but the more excited I got, the harder it was to keep my head moving up and down. Part of it felt like trying to walk on a railroad track, and the other part of it was like being underwater. I kept trying and trying, and then I couldn’t try anymore, and I came.
I scooted up on the bed then and lay beside Del, ran my hand over his chest and belly. When he was lying down, his stomach scooped out under his ribs. I put my nose and mouth to his skin, licked his side and up into his armpit. He had his arm around me, and his one hand was running up and down my spine, from the small of my back to my nape. He hadn’t come yet, so I said, “How do you want it?” I wanted to know if I should lie on my back or on my belly.
“I want your ass, Vangie.”
I didn’t say anything then. It didn’t bother me that Del wanted to fuck that way, but the few times when we did it, it hurt, and I’d
had to make myself stand it. It still scared me, but I wanted to do it, too. Part of me wondered why I wanted to do something that frightened me, but being with Del was about not saying no. If I said no, the next thing couldn’t happen.
“Do you have some lotion?” I said.
He pulled baby oil out from under his bed. “I thought it would work better,” he said.
“You have to go slow in the beginning.”
“I remember.”
So I lay facedown on the bed and let him oil up behind me. He did himself first, then started coating me with his fingers, slipping in one at first, then two. When he got between my legs and I felt him get ready to move into me, I reached around to take him in my hand.
“Guide me in, Vangie.”
I took him in inch by inch, and when he was all the way up, I let myself start breathing again.
“How does it feel?”
“All right,” I said. “Better with oil. How does it feel to you?”
“Tight as hell. Good.”
He lowered himself onto me then, moving into me with his whole body. After the first few strokes, it felt good to me, too, and I knew it could happen that way: something could hurt at first and then feel good. I relaxed then and put my arms all the way out. Let Del drive me down into that bed.
DEL AND I did not fuck all night at his mom and dad’s like we said we would—we passed out for a little while, then we slept off and on, both of us trying to find a way to be comfortable in his single bed. I was next to the wall, so in the middle of the night when I needed to pee, I had to crawl over Del. He woke up a little when I moved over him, but started breathing heavily again as soon as I was out of the bed. I crept downstairs and didn’t turn on any lights until I got to the bathroom.
When I was done peeing and farting—it was something I couldn’t bring myself to tell Del, that if he fucked me in the ass I filled up with air—I looked at myself a long time in the mirror. I was trying to see if my face looked any different, because I always thought my face should look changed as things happened to me. I was sure that spending the whole night in a bed with Del would have an effect, and when I looked in the mirror it seemed like I was different. I figured it was mostly because I looked tired, though, and because I was wearing the black nightgown my mom gave me for the first time. The black made my skin look pale.
Swimming Sweet Arrow: A Novel Page 3
