Mr. Basketball clenched his jaw, like I was going to scream the truth to the entire cla.s.sroom. Like I was that stupid.
We were over. He ignored me in the hallways, didn"t return my glances. I saw him touch Ms. O"Malley"s arm in the lunchroom and then open the door for her as they walked out.
But then we did it late one night at school on Lillian Biggs"s table at the back of the room. I wasn"t expecting it. I had returned to school to clean out my locker. My mother was in her car waiting for me in the parking lot. I walked by Mr. Basketball"s cla.s.sroom and saw him taking down our haikus from the wall. He asked if I wanted to help.
"Sure," I said. I took a tack out of the board and after a few minutes, he came up behind me. His hands were warm on my hips. I wasn"t even ready for it. I was taking down the poems thinking of how little my mother knew about my life; how I was inside the school about to have s.e.x with a man nearly twice my age and she was drumming her nails on the dashboard wondering if we should have asparagus for dinner. Mr. Basketball was pulling down my pants from the back. He was hard and I was dry and the sun was setting. I was reading the last line of Lillian"s haiku when he came into me, which wasn"t a haiku either: the wind whistles in winter and for who? It felt like newspapers being shoved inside me. I bled, even though it was our third time, and the blood collected in the balloon that Lillian had carved into the wood when she was bored. He looked at it, and then at me, apologizing for something, like for a second he thought he had killed me.
20.
I was seventeen when my mother went on her first date: Ron the psychiatrist had asked her to go to an art gallery opening in Stamford. She danced around the kitchen all morning, hummed along with the gurgling coffeepot, told me how nice it would be to date a psychiatrist since a psychiatrist would already know what she needed. "He"s my psychiatrist," I said. "Emily," she said. "Be serious. You only went three times." But when she came home from the date, she kissed me on the forehead and said, "Too weird."
After that, she went on dates nearly every night. The next guy was Seth. He worked for an advertising firm in Westport. He was balding. His feet were larger than my head. He said, "Nice to meet you," and then asked me about my schoolwork like I was a seventeen-year-old on the brink of discovering a cancer gene. "It"s going very well, thank you," I said.
My mother hated him. I could tell by the way she was stiff at breakfast, polishing her nails, cuc.u.mbers for eyes all morning on the couch. And by the time he arrived, dressed head to toe in suede, she hunched her shoulders and threw on her fleece coat like she was already disappointed about the night she had.
Then there was Max, and then Nate, and then Gary, who she met off a dating website my aunt Lee convinced her to join. "Gary is seventy percent my match," my mother said to me, reading off the screen. "Sixteen percent my enemy."
I laughed.
"Whatever that means," my mother said. "We"re going to the opera. His idea."
When Gary arrived at our front door, he was incredibly handsome with a full mouth. Gary was also 90 percent blind from a car accident ten years earlier, something he hadn"t mentioned on his web profile.
"Blind? How did you get here?" my mother asked.
"Cab," Gary said.
"Come in," she said. My mother took me in the kitchen. "Don"t pester him about being blind," my mother said, pouring out salsa in a bowl. "He"s probably a very normal person, just like you and me. No wonder he wanted to go to the opera. If you are going to speak, ask him about the opera."
I didn"t know anything about the opera other than the fact that "opera" was the plural of "opus," so said my vocab teacher Mrs. Miller, who kept holding me after cla.s.s saying, "I"m worried about your vocab, Emily, you didn"t do all your vocab sheets."
We sat down for chips and salsa at our coffee table, and I said, "How do you feel about being blind, Gary?"
My mother crunched loud on a chip.
"Well, Emily, blindness isn"t really the problem you might think it is," Gary said, picking up a chip. "It"s all the confusion that exists around the blindness that"s the s.h.i.tter."
I licked some salt off my finger. What a perfect face.
"With enough help, I barely notice."
Gary finished his chip, and I asked him about the last thing he ever saw: a road sign that said CAUTION DUCKS.
"Gary, we"re going to be late," my mother said, standing up and swinging her white spring jacket around her body.
When she went on dates, I went on dates. Junior year, I had my first real boyfriend, Daniel Blank, who had been coming over to my house every other night for the past two weeks. Even though my mother wasn"t home, for some reason I didn"t want Daniel to know this; I didn"t want him to think that there was nothing we couldn"t do in the freedom of my unsupervised house. So when he asked if he could come over, I said, "Only if we take a vow of silence. My mom is sleeping upstairs."
Daniel arrived in a hoodie and corduroys, and we sat on two separate ends of the couch, and he wrote me a note on a piece of paper that said, Do we break our vows when we sneeze? These were the questions seventeen-year-olds asked, these were the questions we easily answered: yes, of course. Daniel was afraid to kiss me, so every night he left holding out his arms, saying, "Hug?" I hated Daniel against my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and I hated him a little more every time he came over. I guess the thing about regularly having s.e.x with an older man was that when you tried to touch someone your own age, it felt like touching a child, Daniel"s smooth jaw like a baby"s bottom.
After Daniel left, I slipped on the green dress with bulky pockets that I wore almost all throughout my junior year in high school and ran through the dark to Mr. Basketball"s. I pa.s.sed Mark"s house and thought of Laura inside, two years old now, learning how to form "oh"s" and "ah"s" with her mouth.
Mr. Basketball was having me over two, sometimes three, nights a week. I used the fire escape to get in.
When I got inside, the bathwater was running.
"What took you so long?" Mr. Basketball asked.
"I have homework, you know," I said.
Mr. Basketball liked to watch me bathe. I rubbed the soap over my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and he watched from the doorway. "You are so beautiful," he said. "I can"t stand it." He stood by the toilet and dropped his pants. His p.e.n.i.s hung large and twenty-six years old against his thigh. He lit a vanilla candle on his sink. He climbed in the warm soapy water, and I measured our waists with my eye. Mine was half the size of his. I laid my head against the back of the white tub. I put my hands around his waist and on his b.u.t.t.
"You have hair on your a.s.s," I said.
"I know that," he said. We laughed. I felt the coa.r.s.e hairs with my fingertips.
He put his mouth on me under the water. I liked him better this way. Clean. Sterile. There was nothing dangerous about a naked man in water. Even though he weighed one hundred and seventy pounds he felt as weightless as a bedsheet. There was nothing he could do to me in water that wouldn"t wash away. I held on to the sides of the bath with my hands, and his touch was different. He was an unpredictable fusion of body and water, and even with all the pressure on us, I could hardly feel him.
The water rose as he moved up my torso with his head, some of it filling my ears so when he came up for air and spoke, his voice was m.u.f.fled. "Bub b.u.m boat on bib," he said, pointing to his d.i.c.k, which was now lying on top of my chest like a hot dog. I sat up out of the water.
"What?" I asked.
The candle flame throbbed behind us.
"Rub some soap on it," he said.
I climbed out of the tub.
"That"s barbaric," I said.
"What? The soap makes it more sensitive."
I rubbed my legs with the towel. "I"m dating someone," I told him.
"What?" he said. "Who?"
I stood there naked. The oil from the tub made the water bead down my chest.
"Daniel Blank, right?" Mr. Basketball asked. "With the lip ring? I"ve seen you two together a lot lately."
"We"re almost in love."
"We call him Lip Ring Boy in the lunchroom," Mr. Basketball said. "He"s nice. Apparently, not very good at chemistry."
He climbed out of the tub.
"You"re a terrible teacher," I said, and this made him pull me close and kiss me hard until my back hurt and his beard sc.r.a.ped my lips and my cheeks were wet from his hands. I was on his sink now, my legs separated by his hips.
"Don"t do this to me," Mr. Basketball said, holding the ends of my long wet brown hair. "Don"t date boys. Don"t date Daniel Blank."
"I like boys," I said. "Boys don"t have hair on their a.s.ses."
"Don"t be cruel like this, Emily."
But I didn"t like boys. Boys never made sense to me. Their bones were too long for their skin, their acne-faces so red and wilting, they were too embarra.s.sed to look you in the eye, too embarra.s.sed not to look you in the eye, their mouse voices you could barely hear over the music, which was always blasting in my ear. Their breath was irregular and scentless, these boys were always overbrushing their teeth and overminting their mouths in cars, always playing music with no detectable melody, and no matter how long you listened, they never successfully communicated anything. I hated sitting in cars, and on couches, and hugging with closed fists. I liked beards and full calves and throaty, fire-crackling voices that crashed right into my throat, I liked men who tasted like something, who were a part of the world, who felt heavy on my chest, Mr. Basketball warm inside me.
He put his hand on the back of my neck, and I held on to the towel rack. The screenless window was wide open at my head, and I waited for the air to fill my ears, the tiny mosquitoes to come sink their teeth into my cheeks, to suck out all the evil that was in my blood, and before I felt any of this kind of healing, Mr. Basketball whispered in my ear, "You are so good." He kissed me on the mouth.
"There is nothing better than this," he said, and I worried he was right. I worried that once something had entered you, it would never leave-he would plant himself inside me and grow and grow until I was nothing but him. I held on to the sides of his body, and as he came, I heard a tiny push of breath in my ear and we nearly cried.
Mr. Basketball dropped me off at the end of my street and while I sprinted through the dark to my house, the yard felt predatory, but I was full inside. I didn"t even care that I was going to be in trouble. I knew my mother was already home because I knew she didn"t really have it in her to date a blind man; as much as she would have liked to believe her heart was as golden as that of our new neighbor Mrs. Wallaby, who was married to a quadriplegic, we both knew my mother wouldn"t go home with Gary. She didn"t want to be the one who had to drive, or open the door, or boil the tea.
"Your hair is wet, Emily," my mother shouted as I ran up the stairs. "Why is your hair wet?"
"I liked Gary," I shouted back, and shut my bedroom door.
After Gary, my mother didn"t go on any more dates. She was back to her bed again. She was almost forty, she complained. She was back to the therapist, a new therapist. Seeing this one two times a week now.
The more my mother saw the therapist, the more s.e.x I had with Mr. Basketball, about three times a week at this point, and during my health cla.s.s I worried that perhaps it was too much s.e.x, that perhaps tampons would someday be too small for me. I wished somebody would have asked our health teacher Mrs. Blumenthal if something like this was even possible, so I could know if I was being ridiculous or not, but n.o.body did. Only Leroy Hannah spoke in health, raised his hand to ask Mrs. Blumenthal if vaginitis was the condition of constantly having a v.a.g.i.n.a, if there was any doc.u.mented case of a cheerleader getting pregnant while doing a leg kick, and she just shook her head, reminded us that it only took one little sperm to make life bloom inside you; too many girls my age gave birth without even knowing they were pregnant, fetuses drop from our hips like underwear, "and it"s an awful thing," Mrs. Blumenthal said. "A kind of murder." Then she pa.s.sed out a test issued by the government with questions n.o.body could understand: Most genital infections are transient, producing no sequelae (True?) Where do condoms come from? (Trees?) The female condom can be inserted into the v.a.g.i.n.a for how long before v.a.g.i.n.al intercourse? (Condoms can be female?) Mr. Basketball and I never had s.e.x with condoms, male or female. We tried, but there was always an excuse; the condom was too far under the bed, or he bought the wrong kinds, or etc., etc., etc. I pressed down on my stomach and it felt harder than usual. How could I have been so stupid? n.o.body was this stupid. I sat at my desk and convinced myself I was pregnant. I went to the bathroom, sure that you immediately detected anything foreign inside you, rubbed my hand over my stomach until I felt a giant, hard bulge swell between my hips.
I rubbed my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The flab was tender. But my b.r.e.a.s.t.s had been tender since I had gotten b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I put my finger to my underwear. It was wet. Janice would have known what this meant, but Janice wouldn"t even look at me anymore. She walked down the hallway with Brittany now and ignored my gaze, the two of them in matching brown boots, the two of them growing out their hair and nibbling on ecstasy pills between cla.s.s, spreading rumors: Emily Vidal has regular s.e.x with Satan.
I waited at Mr. Basketball"s car after school.
"You can"t wait at my car like this, Emily," Mr. Basketball said.
"I"m pregnant," I said.
"Jesus," he said. "In the car."
We got in the car.
"You"re not pregnant," he said.
"How would you know?"
"I"ve only come inside you once," he said.
"So," I said, furious. "If you shot me in the head once, I"d still be dead."
We were silent until Lake Avenue.
"I"m seventeen," I said. "That"s when my body wants me to have a baby."
"If you are so concerned take a pregnancy test," he said. "But you"re not pregnant. Do you know how many times I"ve e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed inside a woman and not gotten her pregnant?"
"You"re disgusting," I said. "That"s a disgusting thing to say."
"I"m trying to reason with you here," he said.
At Stop and Shop, he said, "I"d go in with you, but . . ."
"I can walk from here, thanks," I said, and gave him the finger.
"Emily," he said. "Please calm down."
I walked away, determined to hate him forever. In the grocery line, I put a pregnancy test and a stalk of broccoli on the conveyor belt.
"Twelve fifty," the cashier said.
"I only have ten dollars," I said.
She removed the stalk of broccoli. "Ten dollars and five cents. I"ll cover the five."
"Yes," I said. "Thank you."
I couldn"t wait until I got all the way home to find out if I was pregnant, so I ran through the woods between the two main streets of my town, Lake and Bolt, and squatted behind an oak tree. I urinated on the stick and some splashed on my pants around my ankles and I closed my eyes. "It will be okay," I repeated to myself, as I waited for the two pink lines to appear. "It will be okay." Mary or Martha or Katherine or Geneva will be a lovely girl, I thought, nothing at all like myself, she will have long blond hair, and she won"t cry at night, and she will eat tuna sandwiches without complaint, she will read the entire newspaper every morning and she will never date boys who don"t have a GPA of 3.5 or higher, she will wear wool socks and polish her toes and she will emerge from my womb acutely aware of the fact that a female condom is an internal device used to prevent pregnancy and can be inserted in the v.a.g.i.n.a at least eight hours before v.a.g.i.n.al intercourse.
Negative.
I threw the stick to the ground and ran all the way to Mr. Basketball"s apartment.
I arrived breathless. He was behind his screen door, biting on a carrot.
"I"m not pregnant," I said.
"Come in," he said, opening the door for me.
His apartment was a tiny condo in a complex next to the commuter parking lot. It was carpeted, brand-new, and bare of anything essential, but at first, this was what I liked about it. I was impressed by the mere idea of having your own home and never feeling compelled to fill up the s.p.a.ce. This was a good sign. He was a man who kept only what he needed and that included me. I walked around the apartment thinking, Wow, this is where your microwave could be. Wow, this is where you could have a fruit basket. This is where the light could hit the mirror on your blue walls and make everything feel like the outside.
Mr. Basketball had a slab of beef on the counter. He cut the meat into squares. He was going to make a stew, he said. He was upset. He was throwing chunks of b.u.t.ter into a pot. He sliced carrots on a board. He wanted to know why I behaved the way I did earlier.
"Don"t say "behave,"" I said.
He said he understood I was young, he knew that and was ready to deal with that, and I said, "Deal with my youth? Like that"s the problem?" I asked.
"I know this is scary for you," he said.
He said it was scary for him too. "Don"t you understand that?" he asked. "I"m a part of this. I"m a person."
I dragged my hand across his chest and unzipped his fly.
"No," I said.