Kitty remembered the careful way in which Danny had wrapped Christmas presents and how dumbfounded he had been when he discovered that she did not know how.
“What do you mean you don’t know how to wrap a present? Are you just sloppy at taping the corners?”
No, she had answered, a little embarrassed, but tipsy and amused with herself at the same time.
“I actually don’t understand what to do at all. How does it not end up a giant crumpled ball every time?”
Danny had looked at her as though his world was about to collapse. She had rubbed his back.
“Poor baby,” she laughed. “You’re dating a monster.”
And then there was the day that the landlady’s dog died. It was only sudden in the sense that Danny had been unaware that the dog—his beloved Mama—was so old. It was not until three days after the death that the landlady thought to inform her tenants. Danny sulked but had not grieved openly. In place of tears, he seemed to suffer a malfunction in muscle memory. He continued to hold the door open when he got home from work, expecting the dog to follow him through. And he could not stop putting his plate on the floor beside his chair after he had finished eating. Sometimes he waited a full minute for the dog to trot into the kitchen at the sound, before he realized his mistake.
A week after Mama died, Danny did it again. He pushed his scraps into a little pile at the edge of his plate—the last crescent of a cheeseburger and a few cold cooked carrots—and lowered the dish to the floor. Kitty, who was also sitting at the table, watched him. She watched his hand return to his lap, his conversation focused on her, while the old expectation ticked in the back of his head, like a wind-up toy that still surges forward when you nudge it. She saw the instant that the expectation died and was replaced by awareness. Danny’s hand moved slowly back down, feeling for the plate without lowering his eyes, as if he could keep Kitty from noticing, if only their eyes remained locked. He would not want to be faced with her amusement and pity, her lips sealed in generosity.
“What?” He was standing now. His eyes were bright, darting over her face in a series of small, sharp assessments. He hooked his arm around her neck, pulling her head uncomfortably toward his chest. “You gonna make fun of me? Go ahead.”
They moved across the kitchen in a strange, upright wrestling match, each person trying to overpower the other, without any clearly defined objective. Kitty remembers how Danny looked at her, narrow and intent and full of laughter, as he pushed her toward the wall. She thought: He is going to push me up against the wall and kiss me, like in a movie.
And he almost did this—it seemed as though that was where they were headed, had he not been distracted by the open broom closet. Kitty watched him measure the closet in one swift glance, as if that was how the decision to shove her in there was made—based on whether or not she would fit. He used his hands to pin her arms against her side, and the force of his chest, leaning in, to throw her off-balance. She allowed it—she must have allowed it, she decided afterward—out of playfulness or curiosity, or that same compliance that she sometimes adopted when she wanted to call his bluff. He closed the door on her and she knocked her fists against the inside and called him an asshole. She was laughing, still caught up in the exhilaration of the moment, her heart drumming deep in her ears, until she heard the scrape of the lock slide into place. It was not a primal panic that set in, meaning that Kitty did not fear for her life directly. Somewhere in her mind there was still the knowledge that it was only a broom closet, that this was only a prank; Danny could not possibly have the cruelty and the endurance to keep her trapped in there for as long as it would take for her to asphyxiate, or starve. And somehow, she felt that her fear was darker than that, that it was born from a place inside, near the base of her spine, like an explosion of hormones, or a seed bursting from a pod. In a way, she was giving birth to this feeling and many more like it. I am a vessel, it said. And I have been letting the world pass through me—water, food, air, and even men—and I have not thought to question it until now.
“Hey,” she called to him. “Hey! I don’t go in here!” As if she were an irate butter knife placed in the wrong drawer. The closet swung open and there was Danny, grinning at her, his face shining with sweat.
“I don’t go in here?” he echoed her, as if what she had said was immensely cute. “I don’t go in here? That’s what you have to say?” His hands slid up her waist, his mouth on her neck, nibbling her behind her ears.
It seemed that his arousal had peaked at this one sentence of hers.
“You’re adorable,” he said, pulling away again to look at her and taking a lock of her hair that had, in all the chaos, fallen in front of her eyes. He tucked it behind her ear, smoothing it carefully back into place, and she could feel the warmth of his hand, radiant against her cheek, as if he had been holding it over a fire.
Gorgon
When I was ten years old, there was a boy in my class named Richie Ross, who was well respected among the older children because he had a pet iguana that would cling to his head when he rode his bicycle. He was the kind of kid who found it humorous to pretend to be a dog all day. He might sit at his desk with his tongue hanging out, or answer the teacher’s question with a bark. Often, he would try to confuse the substitute teacher, convincing her that we were allowed to go to the bathroom in twos, or that we always took a nap after lunch—things that no one actually wanted to do, things we were less impressed by than annoyed by. I was able to ignore him for the most part, until he began to harass me on the playground. I had been playing by the fence, where an old tree trunk had grown into the wire, the bark bulging through the chain-link, like bread rising. Richie came over. He was making a strange motion with his hands, wringing them together while squealing from the corner of his mouth. He asked me if I wanted to have sex, if I thought about it, and if I washed my vagina. At the time, I thought of it as a kind of trick question, the truthful answer being: no, no, and yes, but that’s none of your business. But, not wanting to give the impression that I was cooperating at all, I just said, “No,” and I walked away.
The next day, someone wrote “JENNY CLARKE HAS A DIRTY PUSSY” on the chalkboard when the class was out for lunch. It was immediately wiped away, but as with most chalkboards, the message’s ghost could not be erased fully without a wet sponge and so it remained on our minds throughout the afternoon. I probably found this less upsetting than the teacher, because at the time, while I understood its implications, I assumed that pussy was an arbitrary euphemism, made up by Richie on the spot. Somehow this belief made it more a problem of his than it was of mine.
Earlier that summer, my parents had taken me on a whale watch in Cape Cod. Excited, I had outfitted myself with a pair of binoculars, a purple baseball cap, and a “Save the Whales” pin on my chest. I had studied whales in school and had made a very nice blue whale from papier-mâché, which the teacher hung from the ceiling and kept there even as I moved up a grade. I had expectations about whales. On the whale watch I kept my eyes on the water, concentrating on the broken ribbons of light, the many small waves that looked misleadingly like dorsal fins. We saw a blast of mist and suddenly they were all around us with their battered gray backs, their blowholes that closed tightly, like lips. I ran up and down the deck of the boat, trying to see them as best as I could. I pushed past other children and stuck my head through the guardrails. But what I found disappointed me. The whales seemed much too small. They were no longer than the boat, no wider than a car. I wanted the whales to be colossal, terrifying. I wanted eyes as wide as my kitchen table, teeth the size of mailboxes.
At the time, I liked monsters. I liked tales of the impossible. Myths and legends. When I was very young, my father set up a cassette player on the table by my bed, so I could listen to stories as I fell asleep. My favorites were the Greek myths, where everyone was moody and restless and supernaturally beautiful, unless they were monstrous. I especially liked the story of Medusa, a snake-haired creature, who
was so ugly that the sight of her turned people to stone. I was fascinated and horrified by this concept and would often have nightmares in which some terrible thing lay around a corner and it was inevitable that I must pass it. If I could get by without looking, I would be fine, but my eyelids would become faulty and when I threw up my hands to shield my face, I saw that they were made of glass, or flimsy, like paper. The idea that sight might be linked to death was unbearable for me. Still, I listened to that story every night—how Perseus was able to gaze upon her unharmed by using a mirror, how he beheaded her and then kept the severed head, to be used as a weapon against his enemies. I sometimes wondered if this head still existed, if it and its powers were immortal. It might show up anywhere, it occurred to me, and whoever was unlucky enough to find it would be defenseless. They wouldn’t have a chance. It became habit for me to close the shower curtain before I used the bathroom, to shield my eyes when I opened the refrigerator, or the kitchen cabinets. The head, I reasoned, would be less of a threat to me if I was always expecting it. There was a toolshed outside with a round slice of glass missing from one of the windows that I avoided at all costs, for fear of what bodiless thing might be waiting there to be seen.
The head showed up on the day that Richie Ross wrote that awful message about me on the chalkboard. School had adjourned and I had walked home as usual. I remember that it was raining and some of the boys from my class were gathered along the edge of the sidewalk, waving to the cars, hoping that one of them would swerve and create a large wave of water. Because of this, I did not take my usual route. Instead, I cut through the driveway of a large tenement building to where I knew there to be a path through the woods. This path eventually passed by my backyard, although the trees were so thick that I sometimes misjudged and ended up at the neighbor’s instead. The woods were a common place for teenagers to hang out, and I knew that at least one of them hid a stash of magazines in the cleavage of an old tree. That day the underbrush was heavy with rain and the ground was peaty and the wet soil rose up the spines of the ferns. The birds’ voices were garbled and nectary and I could feel the humidity curling my hair. I climbed the stone wall, glistening with slug trails, at the end of my property and saw my house sitting there shaded by pines. There was something drowsy, or drugged about its appearance, the pine boughs weighted by rain, the gutters dripping, and the dark windows. I was uneasy, approaching it from behind like that, as if I were sneaking up on some dozing beast. I felt very strange, almost compelled to knock at the door instead of letting myself in, and when I did go inside, the house was cold and unwelcoming. I found my father in the kitchen, prepping for dinner. He had taken off his tie but remained in his shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. I sat at the table and watched him work, listening to the cork-popping sound of chopped carrots, the small hiss of onions under the knife. Hunched over the counter, he was so tall that all he had to do to reach a high cupboard was to straighten slightly. I realized that every time he opened a drawer, or a cupboard, or stooped to check the oven, I was holding my breath, as if I expected to see something ghastly hidden there. Somehow, it all came together for me in that moment: that my father had given me the story tapes—perhaps unconsciously, as if by fate—so that I would hear the Medusa story and know what to do. The notion that it was her head, now that she had been killed, that was the threat made it all the more believable and terrifying. Its existence was theoretical, chaotic, like a disease, or a natural disaster.
I began to search my bedroom—my closet, my dresser, the space beneath my bed. I threw books from the shelf, I disemboweled my nesting dolls, all the while holding my hand over my eyes. I ransacked the place until the commotion caused my father to come upstairs. His hands were large and warm around my face and smelled like onions. He was bewildered. My room was in total disarray, the clothes spilling out of my drawers, the lampshade detached, lightbulb bare and hot. Why had I done this? I had no answer for him and finally, having left the stove on, my father was forced to return to the kitchen. Only then did I realize that there was one place that I had missed. In my closet there was a false ceiling that could be reached by climbing the low metal bar that ran across the closet’s width. I tended to avoid opening it, because the crawl space that it led to was dark and, I imagined, full of cobwebs. This time, however, I closed my eyes as I pushed against the ceiling and reached my hand in, sliding my palm along walls, inching it forward until I felt the head there, slippery and cold, like a dead octopus. With my eyes still closed I climbed down, found the window, and thrust it outside. I heard the heavy crash as it fell through the first then second layer of brush below.
The next morning I said goodbye to my father and began to walk to school. My street ran alongside the woods, the heavy maple leaves hanging low over the sidewalk so that they dripped water down your back if you brushed them. The sidewalk remained the same height while the ground sloped downward so that if you jumped off the edge through the guardrail you would find yourself eye level with the road. I walked to the stop sign and looked behind me. Our house was barely visible through the trees, its white paint like flecks of eggshell behind the branches. I ducked under the top bar of the guardrail, bracing myself against a sapling that showered me with hard, tepid drops, and lowered myself to the ground. From there, I could just see the shining tires of the passing cars. I waited there, hearing the cars approach and then slow, creaking slightly, to a stop at the intersection. I waited, water itching the back of my neck, until I saw my father’s car roll quietly down the road. It stopped, something within it shifted and settled, and then something within it picked itself back up and the car continued through the stop sign.
Skipping school felt dangerous to me, not for the anticipated consequences, but for that window of time when I imagined the teacher would wait for me to appear in class, that horrible moment when someone might say, “Where’s Jenny?” and I wouldn’t be there to defend myself. I was about to pull myself back up to the sidewalk when I heard a pattering sound. I turned around and saw a man, about ten feet away, facing the trunk of a tree. Between him and the tree, at the man’s feet, there was a stack of yellow phone books, the pages dark gray and rippled. Some small thing seemed to be hopping on them and then I saw that it was a stream of liquid, hitting the sodden yellow covers. The man was urinating. He zipped up and turned, standing in front of the phone books, as if trying to hide them. His beard was white below his bottom lip and dark blond at the bottom, like it had been dipped in oil. He looked at me with an annoyed but relieved look, then put out his hands, walking slowly toward me. I should have climbed back onto the sidewalk then, but I believed that, having caught him in such a vulnerable act, I owed him some chance to recover himself. He came very close to me, so close that I could smell his clothing. It smelled like some burned thing that had been stuffed into a hole and then unearthed.
“Ah,” he said. “Here she is.” There was something ironic in his voice, some low, suffering drawback, that made me wonder if I was supposed to know him, if I was offending him by not. His hand came forward and picked something off my temple. It was a very small slug, the kind that might attach itself to a leaf and rain down upon you with the rest of the seeds and bits of flower debris. I watched the man roll the slug between his forefinger and thumb before dropping it to the ground.
My best friend Alicia used to dream that an invisible man would come into her room at night and lift her from her bed. The invisible man would carry her around town, showing her the darkened shop windows, the blinking intersections, and the sleeping dogs. He would hold her out slightly whenever there was something that he wanted her to see, like someone offering a baby to be held. And then he would carry her back home, tuck her into her bed, and kiss her goodnight. Years passed and she either stopped having the dream or she stopped telling me about it. In sixth grade, she transferred to a private school, and by the time we were in high school and she had transferred back into the public school system, we no longer knew how to speak to each oth
er. I eventually stopped waving to her in the hallways, because it felt childish. I think we were both relieved.
I must admit that I was jealous of Alicia’s invisible man. There was something exhilarating about the idea of being stolen from your bed, to be conveyed silently through the night. I sometimes dreamed of men, achingly—never one specific man, just the lone presence of one, like a baritone heat wave in the dark. I usually woke from these dreams strangely grieved, imagining that I wanted something that did not exist in the world, as if no one in the history of humankind had ever wanted a man like I did. As if they did not exist in the capacity that I longed for them. It seemed to me that Alicia’s invisible man was one step ahead of the aching, masculine presence in my dream, if not fully developed, then at least solid, responsive. And it seemed to go hand in hand that Alicia would mature faster, would be noticed sooner. Her body began to embarrass me, as if all that we had ever whispered in secrecy was rising to the surface. Her eyes grew sleek with sexual knowledge. She reminded me of a young pregnant cat—a tiny, insecure thing of great importance.
After meeting the man in the woods, I climbed back onto the sidewalk and walked home. I had a powerful inclination that the head had returned, that it was lurking in some unexpected corner, waiting to turn the first person to find it into stone. Normally, it was my father who arrived at the house before me and there was no way to warn him, to explain to him the danger there. So I went inside with my eyes closed and my hands outstretched. I found it easily, in the vegetable drawer beside a large cabbage. I could have thrust the head in front of the mirror and gazed upon the reflection like Perseus had done—the lacquered hills of the face, glaring back at me, like something pulled from a bog. But I didn’t risk it.
Prepare Her Page 12
