My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

  Immediately, I’m afraid. I wish I weren’t and, chewing on the inside of my cheek, I do my best to rationalize it away. I’m not afraid of him but rather of his body—the sheer size of it, the expectation that I do things to it. As long as we stay in the classroom, kissing is all we can do, but going to his house means anything can happen. That the obvious will happen. Meaning sex.

  “How would I even get there?” I ask. “What about curfew?”

  “Slip out of the dorm afterward. I can wait for you in the parking lot out back and whisk you away. Then in the morning, I’d get you back early enough that no one would be the wiser.”

  When I still hesitate, his body stiffens. His chair rolls backward, away from me, and cold air sweeps across my legs. “I’m not going to force you if you’re not ready,” he says.

  “I’m ready.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you are.”

  “I am,” I insist. “I’ll come over.”

  “But is that what you want?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it really?”

  “Yes.”

  He stares at me, the shine of his eyes moving back and forth. I gnaw harder on my cheek, thinking maybe he won’t be mad at me if I hurt myself enough to ignite a fresh round of tears.

  “Listen,” he says, “I have no expectations. I’d be happy to sit on the couch with you and watch a movie. We don’t even have to hold hands if you don’t want to, ok? It’s important that you never feel coerced. That’s the only way I’ll be able to live with myself.”

  “I don’t feel coerced.”

  “You don’t? Truly?”

  I shake my head.

  “Good. That’s good.” He reaches for my hands. “You’re in charge here, Vanessa. You decide what we do.”

  I wonder if he really believes that. He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.

  * * *

  For Christmas I get: a fifty-dollar bill; two sweaters, one lavender cable knit, the other white mohair; a new Fiona Apple CD to replace my scratched-up one; boots from the L.L.Bean outlet store, but you can only tell the stitching is messed up if you look closely; an electric kettle for my dorm room; a box of maple sugar candies; socks and underwear; a chocolate orange.

  At home with my parents, I do my best to put Strane in a drawer and close it up tight. I resist the urge to stay in bed daydreaming and writing about him and instead do things that make me feel like the girl I used to be—reading by the woodstove; chopping figs and walnuts with Mom at the kitchen table; helping Dad haul home a tree, Babe the puppy bouncing alongside us like a furry yellow dolphin as we trudge through the snow. Most nights after Dad goes to bed and Babe follows him upstairs, Mom and I lie on the couch and watch TV. We like the same shows: period dramas, Ally McBeal, The Daily Show. We laugh along with Jon Stewart, cringe when George W. Bush comes on-screen. The recount is long over now, Bush declared the winner.

  “I still can’t believe he stole the election,” I say.

  “They all steal elections,” Mom says. “It’s just not so bad when a Democrat does it.”

  While we watch TV and eat the expensive ginger lemon cookies Mom keeps hidden at the top of the pantry, she inches her feet toward me and tries to burrow them under my butt even though I hate it. When I grumble, she tells me to stop being prickly. “You used to be in my womb, you know.”

  I tell her about the note Jenny gave me with the Secret Santa present, about her and me repairing our friendship, and Mom smirks, jabs her finger at me. “I told you she’d try to do that. I hope you don’t fall for it.”

  She falls asleep, her dishwater blond hair tangled across her face as the TV switches to infomercials. This is when Strane comes roaring back, when the house is still and I’m the only one awake. I stare at the screen with glazed eyes and feel him there with me, holding me, slipping his hand under my pajama bottoms. On the other end of the couch, my mother snores, jolting me out of the daydream, and I flee upstairs. My bedroom is the only safe space to let him in, where I can shut the door, lie on my bed, and imagine what it will feel like to be in his house, what it will feel like to have sex. What he’ll look like when he takes off his clothes.

  I dig through my old issues of Seventeen, searching for articles about having sex for the first time in case there’s something I should do to prepare myself, but they all say the same inane stuff like, “Having sex is a big deal, don’t feel pressured to do it, you have all the time in the world!” So I go online and find a message board thread titled “Advice on Losing Your V-Card,” and the only piece of advice for girls is “Don’t just lie there,” but what does that even mean? Get on top? I try to imagine myself doing that to Strane, but it’s too embarrassing; my whole body cringes at the thought. I close the browser, first checking the search history three times to make sure I deleted everything.

  The night before we drive back to Browick, while my parents watch Tom Brokaw, I sneak into their room and open the top drawer of my mother’s dresser, root around the bras and underwear until I find a silky black nightie with a yellowed tag still attached. Back in my bedroom, I try it on without anything underneath. It’s a little long, reaching past my knees, but it’s tight, the outline of my body visible in a way that seems grown-up and sexy. Staring in the mirror, I pile my hair on top of my head and let it fall around my face. I bite my bottom lip until it turns swollen and red. One of the straps falls down my arm and I imagine Strane, with his tender-condescending smile, slipping it back up my shoulder. In the morning, I stuff the nightgown into the bottom of my bag and can’t stop smiling the whole drive back to Browick, pleased with how easy it is to get away with something, with anything.

  On campus the snowbanks are taller, the Christmas decorations gone, and the dorms stink of the vinegar they use to wash the hardwood floors. Early Monday morning I go to the humanities building in search of Strane. At the sight of me, his face lights up, breaks into a grin, a hungry mouth. He locks the classroom door and presses me against the filing cabinet, kisses me so hard he practically gnaws at me, our teeth knocking against each other. His thigh pushes my legs apart and rubs against me—it feels good, but it happens so quickly I gasp, and at the sound he lets go and staggers backward, asks if he hurt me.

  “I can’t keep it together when I’m around you,” he says. “I’m acting like a teenager.”

  He asks if we’re still on for Friday. Says that over these past weeks, he thought about me constantly, was surprised at how much he missed me. At that, I narrow my eyes. Why surprised? “Because really we don’t know each other that well,” he explains. “But, my god, you’ve gotten to me.” When I ask him what he did for Christmas, he says, “Thought about you.”

  The week feels like a countdown, like slow footsteps down a long hallway. Once Friday night arrives, it hardly feels real to shove the black nightgown into my backpack while across the hall Mary Emmett belts out that five-hundred-twenty-five-thousand-six-hundred-minutes song from Rent with her door wide open and Jenny strides by in her bathrobe on her way to the shower. Strange to think that for them it’s just another Friday night, how easily their ordinary lives go on, running parallel to my own.

  At nine thirty I check in with Ms. Thompson, tell her I don’t feel well and that I’m going to bed early, then wait until the hallway is clear and sneak out the back stairwell, the one with the broken alarm. Hurrying across campus, I see Strane’s station wagon waiting with the headlights off in the lot behind the humanities building. When I throw open the passenger door and slide inside, he pulls me close, laughing in a way I haven’t heard from him before—manic and gasping, as though he can’t believe this is really happening.

  His house is sparse and cleaner than I’ve ever seen my parents’, the kitchen sink empty and shining, a dish
rag drying on the faucet’s long neck. A few days ago he asked what I like to eat, said he wanted to have my favorites on hand, and he shows me the three pints of expensive ice cream in the freezer, a six-pack of Cherry Coke in the fridge, two big bags of potato chips on the counter. There’s a bottle of whiskey on the counter, too, along with a glass holding a mostly melted ice cube.

  In the living room, there’s no clutter on the coffee table, only a stack of coasters and two remote controls. The bookcases are neatly arranged, nothing thrown in sideways or upside down. As he leads me on a tour, I sip a soda and try to appear impressed but not too impressed, interested but not too interested. Really, though, I’m trembling all over.

  His bedroom is the last room he shows me. We stand in the doorway, bubbles pinging inside my soda can, neither of us sure of the next move. I have to be back at Gould in six hours, but I’ve been here for only ten minutes. His bed stretches out before us, neatly made with a khaki comforter and pillows in tartan cases. It feels too soon.

  “Are you tired?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “Not really.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t be drinking this.” He takes the soda from my hands. “All that caffeine.”

  I suggest watching TV, hoping to remind him of the offer he’d made of sitting on the couch and watching a movie, holding hands.

  “I’m sure to fall asleep if we do that,” he says. “Why don’t we just go ahead and get ready for bed?”

  Turning to his dresser, he opens the top drawer, pulls something out. It’s a pajama set, shorts and a tank top made from white cotton dotted with red strawberries. They’re neatly folded with the tags still attached, brand new, bought especially for me.

  “I thought you might forget to bring clothes to sleep in,” he says, putting the pajamas in my hands. I say nothing about the black nightgown in the bottom of my backpack.

  In the bathroom I try to make as little sound as possible as I peel off my clothes and break the tags off the pajamas. Before I put them on, I stare at my face in the mirror, peek in the shower at his bottle of shampoo and bar of soap, inspect everything on the counter. He has an electric toothbrush, an electric razor, and a digital scale that I stand on, curling my toes as the numbers flash—145, two pounds less than I was at Christmas.

  Holding up the tank top, I wonder why he chose this particular set. Probably because he liked the print—he’s said before that my hair and skin remind him of strawberries and cream. I picture him browsing a girls’ clothing section, his big hands touching all the different pajamas, and the thought fills me with tenderness, similar to how I felt a few years ago when I saw a photo of that famous gorilla cradling her pet kitten, the vulnerability of someone so big handling something so delicate, trying their best to be careful and kind.

  I open the bathroom door and step into the bedroom, shielding an arm across my chest. The lamp on the nightstand is on, a soft warm light. He sits on the edge of the bed, his shoulders hunched, hands clasped.

  “Everything fit ok?”

  I shiver and give a half nod. Outside the window a car drives by, the noise approaching then receding, a hush of silence.

  He asks, “Can I see?” and I step toward him, close enough for him to wrap his fingers around my wrist and pull my arm down. As his eyes move over me, he sighs and says, “Oh no,” like he’s already sorry for what we’re about to do.

  He stands, folds down the comforter, and, under his breath, goes, “Ok, ok, ok.” He says he’ll stay dressed for now, which I know is meant to soothe me, maybe also himself. On his shirt, dark circles spread out from his armpits, just like during the convocation speech the first day of classes.

  I slide into bed beside him and we lie on our backs under the covers, not touching, not talking. The ceiling is covered in cream and gold tiles that form a swirling pattern my eyes circle around and around. Beneath the down comforter, my hands and feet are warmer, but the tip of my nose stays cold.

  “My room at home is always cold like this, too,” I say.

  “Is it?” He turns to me, grateful I’ve made this somewhat normal by speaking. He asks me to describe my bedroom, what it looks like, how it’s arranged. I draw a map in the air.

  “Here’s the window facing the lake,” I say, “and here’s the window facing the mountain. Here’s my closet and here’s my bed.” I tell him about my posters, the color of my bedspread. I say that in the summers, I wake sometimes in the middle of the night to the sound of loons screaming out on the lake, and that because the house isn’t well insulated, ice forms on the walls in the winter.

  “I hope someday I get to see it for myself,” he says.

  I laugh at the thought of him in my bedroom, how big he’d seem there, his head brushing the ceiling. “I don’t think that’ll ever happen.”

  “You never know,” he says. “Opportunities come up.”

  He tells me about his childhood bedroom in Montana. It was cold in the winter, too, he says. He describes Butte, the old mining boomtown, once the richest place on earth and now a depressed brown basin cradled by mountains. He describes the abandoned headframes poking up between the houses, how downtown was built on the side of a hill and how at the top of that hill is a big pit of acid left over from the mining.

  “That sounds horrible,” I say.

  “It does,” he agrees, “but it’s the sort of place that’s difficult to understand until you see it for yourself. There’s a strange beauty in it.”

  “Beauty in a pit of acid?”

  He smiles. “Someday we’ll go there. You’ll see.”

  Under the comforter, he links his fingers through mine and continues talking, telling me about his younger sister, his parents; how his father was a copper miner, intimidating but kind, and his mother a teacher.

  “What was she like?” I ask.

  “Angry,” he says. “She was a very angry woman.”

  I bite my lip, unsure what to say.

  “She didn’t care for me,” he adds, “and I could never figure out why.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “They’re both dead.”

  I start to say I’m sorry but he cuts me off, squeezes my hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “Ancient history.”

  We lie quiet for a while, our hands linked under the blankets. Breathing in and out, I close my eyes and try to pinpoint the scent of his bedroom. It’s a thin, masculine smell, traces of soap and deodorant on the flannel sheets, cedar from the closet. It’s strange to think this is where he lives like a normal person, sleeping and eating and doing all the monotonous everyday chores of living—washing the dishes, cleaning the bathroom, doing laundry. Does he do his own laundry? I try to picture him hauling clothes from washer to dryer, but the image dissolves as soon as I conjure it.

  “Why didn’t you ever get married?” I ask.

  He glances over at me and I feel his hand loosen its grip on mine for a moment, long enough to tell me this was the wrong thing to ask.

  “Marriage isn’t for everyone,” he says. “You’ll figure that out as you get older.”

  “No, I get it,” I say. “I never want to get married, either.” I don’t know if this is exactly true, but I’m trying to be generous. His worry is obvious, about me and what we’re doing. The smallest movement makes him jump, like I’m an animal prone to bolt or bite.

  He smiles; his body relaxes. I said the right thing. “Of course you don’t. You know yourself enough to understand what you aren’t made for,” he says.

  I want to ask what I am made for, but don’t want to show I don’t actually know myself, and don’t want to push it now that he’s again holding my hand and tilting his head toward mine like he’s moving in for a kiss. He hasn’t kissed me since I got here.

  He asks again if I’m tired and I shake my head. “When you are,” he says, “let me know and I can go to the living room.”

  The living room? I frown and try to figure out what he means. “Like you’ll sleep on the couch?”

&nb
sp; He lets go of my hand and starts to speak, stops, starts again. “I’m ashamed of how I first touched you,” he says, “back at the beginning of the year. That’s not how I like to behave.”

  “I liked it, though.”

  “I know you liked it, but wasn’t it confusing?” He turns to me. “It must have been. Having your teacher touch you out of nowhere. I didn’t like doing that, acting without talking it through first. Talking through absolutely everything is the only way to redeem what we’re doing.”

  He doesn’t say it, but I know what’s required of me here—to tell him how I feel and what I want. To be brave. I roll toward him, press my face into his neck. “I don’t want you to sleep on the couch.” I feel him smile.

  “Ok,” he says. “Is there anything else you want?”

  I nuzzle against him, slide my leg over his. I can’t say it. He asks if I want to be kissed, and when I nod into his neck, he takes a handful of my hair, draws my head back.

  “My god,” he says, “look at you.”

  I’m perfect, he says, so perfect I can’t be real. He kisses me and other stuff starts to happen fast, things we haven’t done before—pushing the tank top over my breasts, pinching and kneading, slipping his hand under the pajama shorts and cupping me down there.

  For everything he does, he asks permission. “Can I?” before pulling the pajama top all the way over my head. “Is this ok?” before pushing my underwear over, slipping a finger inside so quickly that, for a moment, I’m stunned and my body plays dead. After a while he starts asking permission after he’s already done the thing he’s asking about. “Can I?” he asks, meaning can he tug the pajama shorts down, but they’re already off. “Is this ok?” meaning is it ok for him to kneel between my legs, but he’s already there, letting out a groan and saying, “I knew you’d be red here, too.”

  I don’t understand what he’s doing until he starts doing it. Kissing me there, going down on me. I’m not an idiot; I know it’s something people do, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it’s something he would want. Wrapping his arms under me, he pulls me closer, and I dig my heels into the mattress, reach down and grab a fistful of his hair so hard it must hurt, but his kissing and licking and whatever else he does—how does he know exactly what to do to make me feel good? how does he know everything about me?—none of that stops. I bite my bottom lip to keep from crying out, and he makes a slurping sound, like sucking up the last of a soda through a straw, which would embarrass me if it didn’t feel so good. I drape my arm across my eyes, fall into swirls of color, ocean waves rising to mountains, the sensation of being so small until I come, harder than when I do it to myself, so hard I see stars.