He didn"t answer. He took a sip out of his cup and I could feel the vermouth burn through me. So I said, "I can"t believe you are all drunk."
"We"re not drunk," he said.
"You"re a teacher. Don"t you realize that?"
"I don"t think this is an appropriate conversation."
"I"m just saying. If you take back my F, I won"t go tell Dr. Killigan that all the faculty is drunk."
Mr. Basketball sighed. "It is not a negotiation. I don"t negotiate with my students."
Student? I was just a student? Mr. Basketball walked away from me, out of the cafeteria.
In my last dream of Mr. Basketball, he was standing at the chalkboard writing out lines of "The Waste Land," the ones I had been memorizing all semester. There is shadow under this red rock. My hair was matted to my desk in the front. (Come in under the shadow of this red rock.) n.o.body in cla.s.s laughed, and this surprised me, even though n.o.body had made a joke. All of a sudden, the other students were gone. Mr. Basketball was at my ear, saying, "Let"s listen to dead men not rhyme!" He put on a sombrero and then flicked the end of my cigarette. The ash collected in a tiny pile on my desk. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust!" he said. Then, from the back of the cla.s.s, my mother laughed. "My mother is dying," I said to him. He walked over to my mother, put my cigarette in her mouth. "Stop it!" I screamed at him. "She"s dying!" They both looked at me as though I was guilty of something. "Stop killing us with those turtle sh.e.l.ls," they both said in unison. He introduced himself to my mother. "Hi, I"m Jonathan," he said, and they shook hands.
I followed him down the hall. "Are you sleeping with Ms. O"Malley? Are you sleeping with Janice?"
He stopped. He walked back to me, took my arm. He pulled me into a cla.s.sroom. He pointed his finger at me. He yelled. Something was wrong. Men, they pointed their fingers at me like they were scolding, and I just wanted to touch them.
"I don"t want to yell, Emily," he said. "You"re a sweet girl, who is perhaps a bit confused at the moment. But it is inappropriate to bribe your teachers or ask them questions like that!"
I took off my kitten mask and twirled around the room to prove how little he could affect me. "Well, if you are dating Ms. O"Malley," I said, "I just thought you should know that she slept with Socrates."
Mr. Basketball opened his mouth. He was going to let me have it. Then, he burst out laughing like a drunk. He laughed and he laughed and he laughed.
"That"s just what I"ve heard," I said, and laughed with him.
It felt so good to laugh with him again that I started crying. That is when I whispered to Mr. Basketball, "My mother is dying."
I repeated this because even though it wasn"t true, it felt true. It felt like she was gone, and wasn"t that the same thing?
"Emily," he said. "I"m so sorry." He sat down next to me on the desk and looked at me like he knew exactly what I meant.
"My mother is dying," I said.
We looked at the chalkboard and then back at each other and then out the window.
"Do you know how I know you are drunk?" I asked. "If you weren"t drunk, you would smell the liquor on my breath."
Mr. Basketball leaned in and put his mouth close to mine. "Smart girl," he said.
He hovered close to me for a moment, looking into my eyes. He seemed afraid of something and this was nice, because I was too, and it was mostly him. My psychology teacher had explained that this kind of terror was perfectly normal. In fact, you weren"t healthy unless you feared something violently. "There is so much to be afraid of," she said.
Mr. Basketball was just a boy, I told myself. Only twenty-four. He wasn"t like Mr. h.e.l.ler or Mr. Foster, who both had hairs growing out of their ears. He was smooth, with a trimmed beard. Nothing to be scared about. He put his hand on my thigh and kissed me. I pulled away just to look, to make certain this was happening to me, to make sure it was his tongue in my mouth, and I said, "I can"t believe you are doing this," as in, I can"t believe this is finally happening to me.
"Would you like for me to stop?" he asked, to which I said, "No," and let him pull me closer to him. He grabbed the back of my neck like I was in a dream, at the opera, falling out of my seat toward something dramatic and incomprehensible. I wanted him closer. I wanted him to put his hands everywhere. How could I ever have tolerated being alone? There was nothing better than this warmth. He pushed my legs apart and pulled me toward him. He put his hand on my chest and pushed my body down so my back was against the table. He dragged his hand down my stomach. This is movement, I thought, this is two people against each other, this is the violence of attraction snapping a nerve in my heart. We didn"t even hear the door open.
"Oh my f.u.c.king G.o.d!" one of the girls screamed.
"Oh my f.u.c.king G.o.d!" another one shouted. "This is amazing!"
"Mr. Basketball," Martha said, "this is a Hug-Free Zone!" and fell to the ground laughing.
Mr. Basketball jumped away from me. "Are you girls drunk?" he asked. "Come here," he said to all of them. They approached, giddy smiles spilling from their faces. "Now, look. You don"t tell anyone what you saw here, and I don"t tell anyone that you"re drunk. We"re both happy. Got it?"
"Yes, Mr. Basketball," said the country of France, her baguette limp at her side.
The s.l.u.tty banana threw up vermouth and licorice. They scattered. Behind them was Janice, pale and faint as a haunting, in a sweatshirt.
"Janice!" I said.
"Emily," she said.
I wanted to cry out to her. I wanted to wipe the lipstick off my mouth and hold her to my chest and sob until she felt how sorry I was, but she was gone. She had run out the door.
I ran after her, next to her. She didn"t look at me. Maybe she was running from me? I didn"t know. I didn"t try to speak. There was no point. Janice would never forgive me; even if she did forgive me and called me the next day, she would never look at me the same way she had since we both dressed up as bowling pins for Halloween in the third grade and she pointed at me across Mrs. Dagny"s room and shouted, "Hey, that"s me!"
We congregated in the c.u.n.ts R Us bathroom with the Other Girls. The one who hadn"t eaten since Sat.u.r.day sat on the ground and wanted to know how Mr. Basketball tasted: like sugar like honey like aren"t those the same exact thing? Brittany, who had always secretly hated me, said she couldn"t f.u.c.king believe any of it, not even the honey part. Another one looked at Janice and said, "You"re such a liar! She was doing Mr. Basketball the whole time!"
The one who had six straight shots of vermouth slid down the wall and pa.s.sed out on the floor. "Martha!" we shouted. "Are you okay?" We ran to tell Ms. O"Malley there was an emergency in the girls" bathroom. Because there really was. One giant emergency. One of us held Ms. O"Malley"s hand as we pulled her through the crowd of students I hardly recognized, arctic animals in miniskirts, Cool and Not Cool, human thongs, science teachers with signs that read FAILED ASTRONAUT, f.u.c.kables masquerading as Unf.u.c.kables and vice versa. Fringe members of the Jew Crew came as priests and the president of the Ebony Club came dressed as Tony Blair. We pulled Ms. O"Malley out of the cafeteria, to the bathroom where toilet paper was standing outside the door as a joke. "Need me?" he asked.
"Not at the moment," Ms. O"Malley said. Sometimes, I loved Ms. O"Malley. Sometimes, she reminded me of what our mothers should have been. Corny, lovely, her silk shirt extended all the way to her neck. She held our hands tight as if she didn"t even care how little we knew then about being good people.
"What"s the emergency?" she asked in her smooth British accent.
We pushed Ms. O"Malley hard through the bathroom door, as if she were stumbling upon a carnival, lit up and spinning and sick to the stomach with thrill.
An ambulance was sent for Martha, who would eventually be fine, who would never drink that much vermouth again. She would become president of the Spanish Club and get into the University of Rochester, where she would lose her virginity to a thirty-year-old from Cork, Ireland.
Ms. O"Malley took us to the princ.i.p.al"s office. We sat down in front of Dr. Killigan. One of the girls told Dr. Killigan that she had a brother who was very r.e.t.a.r.ded, even though she didn"t. "Martha"s brother is r.e.t.a.r.ded!" one of us cried.
"But my mother is dying!" screamed Brittany. Breast cancer. "My mother is dying!" she screamed again, and cried so hard I was afraid she was going to throw up her liver. Dr. Killigan nodded his head. Jotted down a pardon for her on a piece of paper. She got up and left for the school psychiatrist"s office. I bit my nail down to the skin and thought of all the dying people I knew. But I knew only dead people. George Washington. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Resnick.
"I don"t know anyone who is dying," I said. "And. That. Just. f.u.c.king. Figures."
"Emily, do not swear in this office," Dr. Killigan told me.
"Fine," I said. "Fine." I won"t swear and I won"t lie. I won"t touch older men. I won"t roll my skirts up to my thighs. I"ll wear stockings made of sheep wool, stockings so thick even my nostrils will sweat. And when I wake up sad about my nightmares, I won"t cry. I will put on my best dress and my highest of heels. I will get back into bed and try to wake up all over again, spread my arms wide and shout, "Good morning, everybody!" I will feel like I"m shouting, but n.o.body will hear. I will grab my backpack and see my mother on her bed in a silk nightgown. She won"t be under the covers and this will convince me that she"s dead. I will check her heartbeat with two fingers. "Alive," I will say to myself.
"Dr. Killigan," I said, and I wanted to stop but I was blanking out on other things to say. "You can"t get mad if I tell you this."
"Tell me what?" he asked. He leaned closer. He scratched his mustache.
But I couldn"t move my mouth to say what I thought he should know: Mr. Basketball touched me. He touched me and it hit me to the core and he is my favorite thing. He spread my legs with his thick arms and laid his body on top of mine and it scared me, but only in the really good way, when the pressure was too much and the terror was what kept you alive until the very end.
"Nothing," I said.
"And you?" Dr. Killigan asked Janice.
"Nothing," Janice said.
Dr. Killigan suspended us for a week.
To comfort my mother, I started watching a lot of reruns of Family Matters, Full House, and The Cosby Show to prove to my mother that a return to family sitcoms was a return to good habits, a return to myself. My mother looked at me during commercials, and instead of telling me I was her angel, she poured out all the liquor that was in our cabinet. She held my hand and asked me to promise that I wouldn"t ever be like that again.
"I won"t," I told her. "I won"t ever be like that again."
"Good," she said. "Now, let"s watch the movie." She cradled me in her arms. She rubbed my head. She cried and hummed the opening song to Sabrina. She held out a pack of cigarettes.
"I"m not going to smoke," I told her.
"Neither am I," she said. "Let"s just pretend."
We put the cigarettes to our lips and watched a movie about a girl who cut her hair short and became happy. We dwelled on how severely the movie departed from logic. Normally, girls cut their hair short and then cried for two to three days. We pulled the unlit sticks from our mouths and laughed like there were haircuts we were too sensible for, and when I put my head on my pillow later that night, my mother didn"t tell me to say my prayers, but rather, she said, "Thank you, Emily. Thank you for being my daughter." She turned off the light.
Dr. Killigan swore the drinking incident would go on our record, but it never showed up. The idea of a stained record was enough to make Janice cry right there in her chair, even though senior year, Janice and I applied to the same universities and she was the one who got into the Ivy Leaguereject schools. I was relieved by this forced separation. I applied to art programs in New York, Los Angeles, and got rejected from all of them except for the Rhode Island School of Design, which was two hours away in Providence.
When we graduated, Janice and I were on two different sides of the auditorium. We were under orders to wear white dresses, white flats, white robes. We were instructed not to throw our caps in celebration. Very dangerous. And under no circ.u.mstances was being naked allowed. Smiling, photographs, cheer: welcome.
"Can we hug?" a boy asked.
"Not until you"ve graduated," Dr. Killigan said.
At the graduation ceremony, the valedictorian preached about living on an island made entirely out of recyclables, while I sat next to girls I never talked to before. We walked. I kept my cap on my head. I watched my mother and father fan themselves with the programs. They were in a room together for the first time since he left and this felt sadder than anything. Mark was in upstate New York with his aunt, graduating from a different high school. Mark got caught with marijuana soph.o.m.ore year and his mother thought it was best he got a fresh start away from Fairfield. Alex Trimble scratched his crotch. Brittany Stone painted her b.r.e.a.s.t.s red and then flashed everybody when she walked. Richard tripped on a wire and face-planted on the ground and everybody laughed, even though Richard cut his face and bled throughout the rest of the ceremony. Mr. Basketball sat with his legs crossed like a choirboy and clapped when I received my diploma.
On the way home, my mother and father chatted politely in the car like strangers, updating each other on their new lives. Prague was nice. So was Fairfield. "So few trees," my father said.
"A lovely daughter you have," my mother said about Laura, but my father thought she meant me. He talked about my accomplishments as a young being: taught herself to read and play the piano, rode a two-wheeler bike when she was three. "So creative," he said. At one point, my father looked at my mother and said, "You look beautiful, Gloria."
"Turn left, Victor," my mother said. "That"s our house, right there." We pulled into the driveway. Laura was four, waddling around her driveway with a Welch"s grape juice container in her hands. Mrs. Resnick watched her from her stoop. Laura ran to my father. Laura had become a chatty child, a product of Mrs. Resnick constantly placing her in the care of the adults in our neighborhood. Laura learned to read at the Bulwarks". She grew up watching Sesame Street at my mother"s. Took her first steps at the Trentons". Alfred taught her how to check the oil in the car, how to know when the gutters were full. "Learn it while you"re young," he said, "and the boys won"t be able to stay away."
My father got out of the car, twirled Laura in the air as though he knew her. I smiled, and even though I tried my best to understand it all, my heart broke a little.
n.o.body ever talked about what happened between Mr. Basketball and me, and this surprised me at first. Every day, I waited for the truth to come out. Every day, I waited for Mr. Basketball to be taken down the hallway in handcuffs. But every day, nothing. Every day, Mr. Basketball stood outside his cla.s.sroom door, welcoming students inside. I supposed my criminal justice teacher was right; when one person witnessed a crime, there was an 80 percent chance he would report it, but if four people witnessed a crime, there was a 10 percent chance one of them would report it.
Junior year at one of Martha"s elaborate birthday parties (Martha still on occasion wanted to be my friend and invited me to things even though n.o.body else did), Janice waved her beer in the air and asked me what happened with Mr. Basketball. She took a long sip and then demanded to know what it was about her that didn"t work exactly. Why couldn"t she just look like me, and if she did look like me, would that have been enough? Would Mr. Basketball have f.u.c.ked her instead? Just tell me how many times, she said. Just tell her. Did he ask for her while he was with me, and if he did, what did it sound like when he said her name? Was it even possible to feel romantic with his d.i.c.k so old and large, expanding like a drying sponge inside me?
"I don"t know," I said. "Maybe."
Janice took out her ponytail. She tousled her hair and prepared to walk away. "You were my best friend," she said. "When I saw him on top of you, I said to myself, "Who is that man raping my best friend?""
19.
My mother made me go see Ron the psychiatrist one more time. I hated Ron, the way he stared at my mother when she dropped me off at the door. I hated how my mother wore a black dress with a shiny red plastic belt, like dropping me off at someone"s house was something to look s.e.xy for, or how she let him take the check out of her hand so slowly that their index fingers touched and it became obvious she wasn"t wearing her wedding ring anymore. I hated the way he talked so flatly, "Emilywhydon"tyoucomein," his words strung together like sterile white Christmas lights. When I sat in his chair and listened to him ask me about my life, it felt like sitting in my father"s luxury car that rode so smooth I vomited all over the leather seats. I was so horrified to have ruined his seats, I kept quiet and put my sweater over the mess. My father was in the front seat driving, saying over and over again, "Tell me the truth, Emily. Did you vomit on the seats?" And I would never admit it, shouting, "No, it wasn"t me!" and even when my father stopped the car to check the seats, even when he held me in his arms and said, "It"s okay, it"s not your fault you are sick," I refused to claim the vomit as my own, because the way I saw it, it wasn"t the truth that solved our problems; the truth was always just the beginning of our problems.
"There"s not much to talk about," I told Ron.
"Why do I feel like that"s not the truth?" he asked.
The truth was a week after the Halloween in Spring, I sat in Mr. Basketball"s car in some corduroy skirt thing and purple strappy sandals that laced up my ankles. We drove to the valley, the low swooping forest between Fairfield and Westport where Janice and I went as younger girls to watch the older kids smoke weed and make out against trees. On the way there, I listened to Mr. Basketball talk about how inappropriate it was for us to touch. He was sorry, so sorry. He was twenty-four, he kept saying. I was fifteen.
"When I was in college," he said, "you were in fifth grade."
He looked straight ahead at the dirt road and said, "It"s just not a good idea." He was regretful.
I put his hand between my legs.
"Stop it," he said, but didn"t take his hand back.
I pressed his fingers harder against me until he moved his fingers around my underwear and inside me.
"I don"t know what I"m doing," Mr. Basketball said. "But I can"t stop thinking about this."
His hand was a tight fit. That was fine. Better that way. He took one finger inside me. I held tightly on to the door handle.
"Don"t open it by accident," he said, and locked it, and for one never-ending second, I felt like a child again, my excitement something to be feared, something he couldn"t control. I am not a child, I wanted to scream.
Mr. Basketball put another finger inside me as if he heard me and I remember it feeling like a tampon but a little bit better. He rubbed them back and forth against me, his other hand on the wheel. He even put his blinker on at some point, even though there were no other cars. I heard the clicking of the blinker, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, a metronome. My eyes were wide open.
"Relax," Mr. Basketball said.
"You relax," I said.
He filled me, slowly, with every finger, every turn, and I felt my legs spread. I am free, I thought, free and pressed against the world and hoping that everything I learned from my past as an optimistic child was true: a gentleman never asks for anything in return.
The first few times Mr. Basketball and I had s.e.x, we managed to do it without having to see each other naked. The first time we did it we were parked in his car in the valley. We climbed into the backseat. We didn"t even speak, except once when he said, "This may feel strange for the first few seconds." He didn"t even fully take my pants off. He slipped them down to my thighs. I remember the constriction feeling the best. Then he pulled out. His p.e.n.i.s was scary to me at first. His p.e.n.i.s looked like an alien in my hands, growing with my help, and I found ways not to touch it, until he guided my hands up and down. He groaned when I moved it fast, closed his eyes and rested his head against the window, and I got less scared each time, accepting the power such a simple act offered me.
And then once in the music storage room. It was cold. The room was small with thin gray carpet and I cried after in my bed thinking of how sad the violins looked alone in the corner. It was embarra.s.sing to have s.e.x in front of the wrong things, especially a violin, which was so dignified at every angle. I was sure Mr. Basketball felt this way too while I was bent over on the table. We were disgusting at that angle. He even went soft while he was inside me, and it felt like my fault, the violin"s fault.
"It"s my fault," Mr. Basketball said, pulling out of me. "Don"t you ever think this is your fault."
"I don"t," I said. My insides burned. We didn"t speak for weeks. Freshman year ended. I stood up in front of the cla.s.s and recited my verse of "The Waste Land."
""For you know only a heap of broken images,"" I said. ""Where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water.""
Mr. Basketball wrote things down on his clipboard.
""Only there is shadow under this red rock, (come in under the shadow of this red rock), and I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind. Der Heimat zu. Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du?""
Mr. Basketball corrected my p.r.o.nunciation. A knife sent straight to my spleen.
"How would you know?" I asked him, standing in front of the cla.s.s. "You"re not even German."