I put his p.e.n.i.s in my mouth, and I could still hear him above saying, "This is scary." I heard him slide the carrots into the pot. They sizzled. His life hung by a thread when he was around me, and we both knew this. I could be anyone I wanted around him, my good self, my hateful self, my needy and terrible self, and he would love me because at the core, I was a young girl with long brown hair and as I continued to hold him in my mouth, the quieter he became, the better we both felt.
He slid down the kitchen cabinets and took my face in his hands. "Jesus," he said. "You are so young."
He had red wine teeth. I wiped his mouth with my fingers.
"Oh for Christ"s sake," I said. "I"m seventeen. In a different century, I would already know how to skin a chicken with my teeth and feed four children off my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and have five years left to live."
"Fair enough," he said. "Are you staying for dinner?"
"Yes," I said. "Yes I am."
We ate at his kitchen table and over the silence of the meal, it occurred to me that even though I"d just held his s.e.m.e.n in my mouth-"babies," I had joked while I inspected the fluid like a scientist-we had never eaten together before. I had never seen him take his knife and fork and cut into his steak, just as he had never seen me drag a carrot across my plate. He was sipping on wine and I was drinking water. I reached out for his winegla.s.s and drank some. This made us both nervous.
"Thanks for dinner," I said. "You"re a real Batali."
He smiled.
"You don"t even know who that is, do you?" I asked, imitating the tone he used to ask questions of Lillian Biggs, who never ever knew the answer in English cla.s.s.
"Fat man," he said. "White shirt."
It was official: it didn"t matter what I knew. It didn"t matter if I read the dictionary from front to back or if I could conduct a twenty-minute conversation in Spanish or solve a math problem with three variables. It didn"t matter if I learned how to get my mother to stop crying at night (hand on back, goofy grin on face) or if my legs grew thin, my b.r.e.a.s.t.s st.u.r.dy and reliable things, my face strong and lean now, my skin tightening at each cheekbone (eat a cheeseburger, my mother kept saying). It didn"t matter if Mr. Basketball and I had s.e.x backward or forward or with my knees at my ears or if I swallowed or spat or put soap on it, it didn"t matter how careful both of us had been never to mention the word "rape"-there would never be one thing I knew that Mr. Basketball didn"t already know. This was why all of our teachers and parents warned us about getting involved with adults; this was why they pa.s.sed out s.e.xual abuse pamphlets during school a.s.semblies and grown-up women perched on stools and talked about the time that Benny (the uncle) showed his p.e.n.i.s to Karen (the ten-year-old) and that when Benny put his privates to Karen"s privates (privates being anything that was normally covered by a bathing suit) it felt good, Karen told all five hundred of us in the auditorium, even though it also felt bad.
"It felt good to my nerve endings," Karen said, and I couldn"t even open my eyes because I knew that Mr. Basketball was bright red in the front of the auditorium, and that the whole school was staring at me in my seat. "But bad for my heart."
"Thank you, Karen," Dr. Killigan said, taking the microphone from her.
Mr. Basketball and I cleaned the dishes, and he put his hand up my shirt. It was soapy. When he kissed me, his tongue was gritty down the side of my neck. When his mouth reached the tips of my fingers, I practiced distancing myself from him, pretended it was just a cat, licking b.u.t.ter off my finger with its tongue.
My father called home to say, "Your mother tells me you need to eat a cheeseburger."
"Very funny, Dad," I said.
"Your mother tells me you have a boyfriend," he said.
"Oh, cut it out, Dad."
"Is he nice?"
"He"s all right."
"What"s his name?"
"Daniel."
"Is he smart?"
"He wants to be the president of the United States."
"That doesn"t sound very smart."
"He can be kind of mean."
"Mean how?"
"He makes fun of fat people," I said. This was true.
He laughed.
"A lot," I said.
"Then why is he your boyfriend?" he asked. "You can do better than that."
Daniel confessed to me late one night on my couch that he wanted to get to third with me, that he"s been afraid to unb.u.t.ton my pants out of fear of how I might react. He was sweaty and red and breathless, like this was a confession he had been holding in all summer long. "You make me feel like I can"t or something," he said. "Well you can"t," I said.
I discovered jean shorts that summer. "Daisy Dukes," my mother called them.
Mr. Basketball and I were better during the summers. The sun made us feel like better people. Before I entered my senior year, Mr. Basketball and I slept together on a real bed nearly every day. Mr. Basketball started to ask me if I would call him Jonathan. I was almost eighteen. "No," I said. We were in his apartment. We lay on his bed and spent too long next to each other, amazed at how normal touching each other felt out of school. We were just like any two people: we laughed and we slept and we loved each other and when we got hungry, our stomachs growled.
"That"s our stomachs saying h.e.l.lo to each other," Mr. Basketball said.
"I can"t understand what they are saying," I said.
"They speak Spanish."
"I didn"t know my stomach was fluent."
"Oh, they"re just saying h.e.l.lo. No need to be fluent for that."
But then high school started again and in the hallways, Mr. Basketball would look at me like I was any of the other students, like I was Janice or Martha or Lillian Biggs, and I would go into the bathroom and cry until it hurt.
People graduated, dyed the underside of their hair pink, cut the legs off their jeans, screamed out windows of cars, drank and drank and drank until Marcy Livingstone got pregnant and made everyone feel guilty for it. I sat on my driveway at home, sober and anxious, waiting for Mr. Basketball to bring me to his apartment.
My mother kept a watchful eye. She found me in a skirt on the stoop and bent down to look at me. "Why are you dressed like that?"
"Dressed like what?" I asked.
"Like that," she said.
"This doesn"t even go above my knees," I told her.
"It"s not how short it is. It"s how tight it is. Do you want everyone to see the outline of your crotch?"
"Maybe."
"Since when do you wear skirts?" she asked, and this did not make me angry as much as it saddened me. I was wearing skirts and this made my mother sad because where could she wear her skirt to? That was what she was asking me, and we both knew that she would never ask it like that and I would never answer her the right way.
My mother sat down next to me and lit a cigarette. "A woman wears skirts when she needs to look pretty. I know this, Emily," she said.
I could not look at her face. I heard the sound of her cigarette leaving her mouth and felt the trail of smoke reach my nose.
"You"re sleeping with that man, aren"t you, Emily? That man who drops you off at the house sometimes?"
I pretended to be offended. "What man?" I asked, standing up. "I don"t know what man you are talking about."
"I"ll call the police right now," my mother said, and so I protested as I walked away from her: Mom, please stop it, you are overreacting, you are being embarra.s.sing, who is feeding you this bulls.h.i.t? I can"t help it if there are men who want to drive me home, and well, who can blame them; she said, Emily, you are beautiful and you need to be aware of that, you need to start being real aware of that.
"Were you not going to pick me up?" I asked when I arrived at Mr. Basketball"s apartment, sweaty and red, my legs chafed between the thighs.
"I was on my way," he said, sipping on some wine. There was the beagle, Penelope, quietly sleeping in the corner of the room.
"Mr. Basketball," I said, walking through the door, "your place is a mess."
"Please, Emily, I told you to call me by my name."
"Why?"
"Why? It"s my name."
But I couldn"t. I was afraid to. So I just stopped addressing him. And he was still secretly afraid to see me naked during the day even though I was eighteen now and my b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung circular from my chest, full at the bottom. He took off my shirt like he was removing a Band-Aid. Then my bra. He turned me around. His stomach was against my back, and he kissed my neck with his mouth. Then my ear, my spine. He watched me drop my skirt, then put me on the bed slowly like I was sick.
I was in awe of Mr. Basketball when we were in school and embarra.s.sed of him out of school, especially in the morning, when his hair was greasy and clumped, early bald spots exposed. His bed was really just an elaborate futon, and he didn"t even have a sheet on it. Just a black comforter and a worn-out pillow, and crumbs sometimes stuck to my legs. He had a poster on the wall celebrating the achievements of Quentin Tarantino and napkins that hung out of the pantry. He had so many TV dinners stocked in his freezer he joked about nuclear fallout to avoid feeling embarra.s.sed. Frozen broccoli, turkey medallions, chicken breast with a mysterious sauce. Orange juice from concentrate. A sock in the utensil drawer. A key chain that said IRELAND and when I asked him why Ireland, he didn"t even know.
"This is where you could put a fruit basket," I said, pointing to the bare table. "And this is where you could hang curtains. You can choose to block out all this light if you wish."
"I like my place the way it is, thanks," he said.
"I"m just saying. You have more choices than you think you do."
Two weeks before I left for college, he kissed me on the mouth and got out of bed. "I can"t believe you"re leaving me in this s.h.i.t hole." He turned on the gas stove and cracked an egg into a bowl. With my eyes closed, the world sounded angry. "What am I supposed to do without you?"
"You"re not making eggs, are you?" I asked sleepily in my white bulky underwear that I only wore at the end of my laundry cycle ("Harriet," he sometimes called it).
"Sure am."
"I hate the way you cook."
"And what way is that?"
"Like n.o.body ever taught you how."
He said n.o.body ever did teach him how.
"You scratch the pan with a fork. You"re not supposed to do that."
"Says who?"
"I"m leaving."
"Don"t leave like that," he said, and walked over to me. "Don"t leave complaining about my pans."
"You don"t live right."
I picked my jeans off the floor and stuck a leg in each hole. He walked over, pressed his stomach into my back, put his hands around my waist. "Don"t leave," he said.
"You don"t have extra things like cheese," I said. "You don"t have amenities. You don"t have soap that smells any good. You"re twenty-seven and you hate your job and you have nothing besides a sock in the utensil drawer."
"You"re eighteen," he said. "What do you have?"
"My whole life," I said.
He moved his hands down my thighs, until I turned around and met him with my face. "Just eat the eggs," he said.
He said that sometimes when he was alone in his bed, he worried he was becoming obsessed with me. Consumed in a way he felt too old for, too tired for. He said he"d draw the lines of my body with his finger at night. He used the white ceiling as a canvas. He slept next to someone else to feel independent of me, someone his age, someone who wore too many gold rings and went to the gym every day just to feel good, someone who understood exactly what he meant when he said, "I"m bored of Nietzsche, just so bored of him," someone who posed questions in his head about the strangeness of feeling.
"Whose beagle is that?" I asked.
"A friend"s," he said.
"You cannot sleep with other women," I said. "That"s not fair to me."
"I"ll stop sleeping with her when you can say my name properly," he said.
"How can you sleep with someone else?"
"How can you keep calling me Mr. Basketball, like I"m some kind of a joke or something?"
"You are a joke!" I said, angry. "You"ve always been a joke. You were just supposed to be a joke."
Janice and I had always dreamed of touching him since the moment we saw him walking down the hall freshman year. We laughed on the bus thinking about touching him, how crazy to have Mr. Basketball"s b.a.l.l.s in our hands and his hands on our tiny bodies. "His b.u.t.t is sooo amazing," Janice said sometimes, but this was always supposed to be a joke because we didn"t even know what separated a good b.u.t.t from a bad b.u.t.t ("It"s all just b.u.t.t," I told Janice).
And when it was real, it wasn"t funny, when you touched someone, they were always with you. When his mouth was on mine, we held the same breath in the same moment, and when he was naked, his body was covered in tiny black hairs that stuck to my clothes even after I washed them. He had slowly become a part of me and when he was cruel, or cold, or acted like we couldn"t go on like this anymore, it felt like he was ripping my limbs off, one at a time. Janice had always understood this kind of pain, but I didn"t, not until now, listening to Mr. Basketball explain how easy it was to be with me one day and someone else the next. He would feel the woman"s curly hair against his chest, and he"d think about me. Her hair would itch like a wool carpet against his skin, and mine was smooth like silk, and that was when he knew: it was only in difference that we realized whom we loved.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"I love you," he said. "I love you I love you I love you."
I loved him so much I let him take off my shirt right there while the eggs were burning. I loved his sand hair, his accidental handsomeness. It was all too human and overwhelming. He touched me the same way every time, the neck down to the chest to the pubic bone. He made my shape seem so contrived, planned just the way he would want me, as though he charted and mapped me, a body so simple he had already memorized it. He held my hips with his two hands, centering me under him. This man could kill me, I thought, snap me in two if he so pleased. Hang me from the back porch to dry. And then his grasp would soften. His fingers would dance on my skin. He was so surprising in his features, a different person at every angle. He was sleeping with other women.
"Sometimes, randomly and unexpectedly, I don"t even know you," I said, pushing him off me, backing away.
"Maybe you don"t," he said, moving toward the stove, sc.r.a.ping the eggs with a fork. "Maybe I"m not myself. Maybe I"m reincarnated, an ancient Egyptian goat herder."
"Impossible," I said. "You"re too lazy."
"Not impossible. There are so many reasons to believe in reincarnation. So many accounts, Emily, so many children who know other languages, never having been exposed to them before. Or people who can describe their old bodies down to the tiniest fatal wound that matches with the corpse they claim to have been in."