like how this happened today because this girl was moving at a certain speed from a certain height at a certain time, and there was, as there always will be, a certain force;
like how eventually she’ll have to rise; and eventually this day will end; and eventually, on another day, she’ll drown;
the big kid tells the small kid to get help; he’s taking off his shirt; he’s handing the shirt to us; he says to hold the shirt to the cut; he’s acting like he’s in charge; like he’s some kind of savior or something; but we’re not falling for this gesture; we’re just staring at his shirt; he says to take it and please; we’re expected by him to do what he says; he’s a guy, after all, local or not, and we’re expected to listen to guys; but which one of us can touch that dirty shirt; and which one of us can touch the shirt to her; we’re finding other things to do with our hands; we put them into pockets; we scratch at bites on our legs; we comb the knots out of our hair; so the big kid holds his shirt to her; so she holds his wrist;
last night, she just pointed to the sky and laughed—and not at us—she would never have laughed at us—but at something we’ll never know;
we’re not in love with my brother’s friend; we just love when he lifts us and spins until we’re laughing so hard we could die; we just want to be with him again with him looking at us the way he does; we want to feel that significant weight, his crushing fucked-up weight against our ribs;
this is a story about desperation; you could also say acceleration; but in this story, they’re the same;
the doll she wants is a doll, she says, from when she was a kid; she’d left the doll in her yard, she says, and we say, There is no doll; but she’s only talking to the big kid; she’s holding his wrist and looking at him like do this for me; like you have to do this one thing; he’s looking at us like what should I do; we’re looking at him like this is all yours; like this is your thing you started; we say again, There is no doll; but she’s only talking to the kid; the doll’s limbs were chewed right off, she says; they were chewed ragged by a stray, she says; and she found it like that in the yard, she says; and her mother, she says, stitched it up;
it’s hard not to be struck by her words; struck by her choices in this moment; because she’s the one chewed ragged; she’s the one who needs to be stitched; the doll is her, and how does she not see this;
so perhaps we’re confusing terror with humor; and perhaps this says something bad about us; but we’re so hungover we can’t even think; so we’re laughing now; and she says to stop laughing; and this makes us laugh even harder; so she says to the kid, This isn’t funny; she says to the kid, This is real; This could have been them, she says to the kid; and she’s right that this isn’t funny; and she’s right that this is real; but she’s wrong that this could have been us;
it couldn’t have been us because: one, we don’t ride bikes; two, if we did ride bikes, we wouldn’t ride that fast; three, we wouldn’t be going to find my brother’s friend in the day; four, we would never make our feelings known; five, we’re not that desperate; six, we’re not that dumb; and on and on and on;
our master plan is science; and by master we mean control the world; and by plan we mean control the world; and by science we mean fuck you;
we say, Get up; but she won’t get up; she’s mad at us, she says; we laughed at her, she says; and she wants her doll, she says; she says she’ll stay there, and she’ll die there, unless she gets her doll; she says to the kid God is punishing her; we roll our eyes so hard; she’s done some things, she says to the kid; the kid says, What kind of things; but we don’t give a shit what kind of things; she looks like she’s about to cry; she says to the kid she just needs help; no shit she needs help; We’re waiting for help, the kid says;
this is a story about salvation; but that doesn’t mean this girl was saved; and it doesn’t mean that we were saved; or that anyone was, or ever would be; it only means that something, in this moment, needed saving;
at times you just want to keep pause pressed; you want the planet’s spinning to stop; you want to stop rushing into space; you want a second to think about things; or not to think about things; just a second to pull it together; to understand your sad desire; this sad force;
at times you just want to surrender to holy, to fall to your knees—we’ve seen this surrender in this girl before—in front of it all;
my brother’s friend is walking toward us; there are girls in bikinis walking behind him; the younger girls who want to be us; typical girls like we once were; my brother’s friend doesn’t see her yet; he sees us, though, so we pretend we don’t see him; we’re trying to look better than we feel; we’re trying for something like casual, something like beautiful; he points his fingers at us like a gun; his shoulders look so wide;
he came to the boathouse late last night; by then, we were just a drunken mess; we said, Where have you been; he said, What do you care; we said, Don’t you love us; he said, What; then that look in his eyes we know too well; then he walked outside, and we watched from the window; we watched him find her on the lawn; we weren’t spying on them; don’t think we were; we just watched him lie down next to her; and were they holding hands; and was that God punishing us;
when you’re with him, nights, it’s first like flying; it’s then like crashing again and again;
then, after, you’re back in your normal orbit; you can feel an entire revolution;
then, after, alone on your back, looking up at some star, some ceiling, some flash of thought, it’s like being punched in the gut and punched in the gut and punched in the gut;
so you’re driven right up to the line of violence; you can feel your fingernails cutting into your palms;
so you drink what’s left; so you find your friends; how it always goes; the guys being guys; the girls being girls; the girls being guys;
the night on the boat was different though; it was different because of the boat; it was tied to the dock; but it felt like we were floating farther out there, somewhere;
no, the night was different because he stuck around; so I stuck around until it was light; and then everything was the same;
this is a story about forgiveness; because I’ve done some things; and what kind of things; does it even matter what kind;
at times I want to fall to my knees; I want to stay on my knees;
and at other times I want billions of years and trillions of miles of something real;
now everything is going too fast; a summer cop running toward us; my brother’s friend running toward us; and his face has changed to serious; so this is serious now; so he pushes us out of the way like we’re guys;
now everything is so sad; the big kid looking smaller now; the small kid holding the stuffed dog now; he’s petting it now, and I’m scared for these kids; so I say to these piece of shit local kids, Run; I say, Now;
so it’s the big kid outrunning the small kid; the small kid running like a girl;
it’s the cop bent over her body; my brother’s friend bent over her body;
it’s the girls in bikinis whispering; these girls now looking at us and please; you do not want to look at us today; you do not want to be like us today; because we’re not the saviors in this story; we would have let her die there;
Animals
were it not just things standing in for other things;
were it not just me cast in the role of idealized me;
were, growing up, our father’s portrait not above the piano no one played but him;
were it a grand piano so the portrait made more sense, but we weren’t that kind of rich;
we were another kind of rich, which is to say new money, meaning barely money compared to old;
but were we not performing old money in a brand-new-money house;
were there not portraits of other members of our family on other walls, though not portraits of us all;
when you cut your hair, he said to my brother, we’ll get your portrait done;
when y
ou gain some weight, he said to me;
the portraits were in our house in the city, not in our house at the shore;
our house at the shore was a lesser version of our house in the city, a number of rooms, a piano, as well;
our house at the shore had no portrait above the piano, but a painted seascape that looked nothing like the sea;
our father called the seascape redundant;
he called it an obligation;
perhaps it was above the piano at our house at the shore where our portraits, mine and my brother’s, would have gone, had they ever been made;
it wasn’t a big deal to me that they weren’t;
it wasn’t until several years later that I even remembered there was talk of these portraits that never got made;
because several years later, when I was in college, I was with a guy whose portrait hung above his bed;
he said a well-known painter had painted it;
he said this well-known painter had said to him, I would love to paint your portrait;
I cared less about who painted the portrait, and more about where it hung;
because I wasn’t sure, at first, if I could be with a guy whose portrait hung above his bed;
but the guy was old money, and the rules were different;
and we got drunker, and he got his way;
this isn’t a story, besides, about my thing with this guy, which was short-lived and is, now, nearly forgotten;
this is a personal history of not knowing where to look;
the choices, my God, we have to make;
take this scene in our house at the shore, for instance;
take my parents in this scene in our house at the shore;
it was breakfast, and our father, when he was around, would molest our mother, when she was around, at the stove in the kitchen every morning;
it wasn’t every morning;
and is molest too strong a word for what he did;
is it too hard a thing to prove;
when one is so much bigger and so much smarter at seeming together;
when one is a tyrant, and the other is not;
and the other has been known to get carried away;
she has been known to carry on;
so it was our father’s hands all over our mother, early mornings, at the stove, and I was trying to eat my eggs;
it was my brother moving food around and around on his plate;
it was the clicks of his fork, the scrapes of his fork, the sound of chewing I couldn’t stand;
he never looked directly at the scene going on at the stove;
I couldn’t help but look, though I knew it wasn’t right;
and it wasn’t right to think about it later, yet I did;
it wasn’t right to play it back, our father’s hands pushing our mother at the stove, our mother saying, Stop it, saying, I’ll burn your eggs, our mother pushing our father away, pushing with her hands, her hips, our father holding tight and laughing in that way he often laughed;
like a guy getting his way again;
like the guy I wanted to be;
that dick I always wanted to be;
after he left, our father said to me and my brother, Your mother is ice;
he said, A block of ice, and positioned his hands as if holding a block of ice;
and what did we do;
we sat there I guess and laughed I guess;
but I had these dreams, I now can say, of fighting our father until there was nothing left to fight;
they weren’t sleep-dreams, really, but daydreams, and in them I could really fuck him up;
this isn’t to say I was violent;
I mean I wasn’t inherently violent beyond a baseline kind of violent;
I’d gotten up in faces before, but not with a fist up to the face;
like all those times some girl fucked the guy I liked;
and all those guys I didn’t like who checked me out;
all the locals who said such shit when I walked past;
and I was like what the fuck are you looking at;
I was like don’t you fucking look at me;
the portrait of our father above the piano was him in a collared shirt I’d never seen him wear, and the portrait of our mother was her in a flowered dress I’d never seen her wear, and the portrait of our dog, who we only owned for a short time because he’d turned, in the words of our father, wild, was him sitting up in a low-lit room I’d never seen;
the portrait of the guy I was with was him in a three-piece suit, standing against a dark wall;
when I was in his bed, it was sometimes the portrait I looked at;
this had to do with position;
I realize when I say position there are other ways to read it;
like one’s position in life and all of that;
but I just mean he wanted me positioned in a certain way, so he could watch me from below;
though this wasn’t just about watching me, I later learned, but watching his effect on me;
he would say things like, Do you like it like this, Do you like it like this, Do you like it like this;
he would say things like, Look at me baby, I said look at me baby, I said look at me;
my choices were look down at his face or look up at the portrait;
and there was something about his strained face, his red face, his working too hard to make me work hard too;
and there was something about the portrait;
so I often closed my eyes and put my mind somewhere else;
it was often somewhere in outer space;
it was orbiting the planets;
it was making shapes from stars;
it was a secret I had, my mind going out to some too cold place, some too hot place;
I admit I got off on the secret;
it wasn’t unusual, getting off on a secret;
it was the thing, I would guess, most gotten off on;
still, I made the clichéd sounds one makes;
as the headboard made its clichéd sounds;
and the bedsprings made their clichéd sounds;
as stars exploded in my mind into stars exploding into stars;
I sometimes thought of one of the locals from the shore;
he worked at the rides in the months that there were rides;
he looked like a star we liked;
like the poorest version of that star;
the girl and I would stand there staring at him;
she wanted him first, but I wanted him more;
with some guys it didn’t matter;
like my brother’s friends;
or guys who came in for a week;
with this guy, though, it was different;
our father said not to talk to the locals;
my brother was told not to let me;
Keep an eye on her, our father would say;
as if my brother’s eye on me;
as if any guy’s eye on me;
I mostly knew not to fight our father;
I mostly knew not to fight him, because our father would have fought me back;
and I knew I would have lost that fight;
this wasn’t molestation, a father fighting a daughter;
it was just a father fighting a daughter, that was all;
but our father pushing into our mother at the stove was something else;
as was our mother pushing our father away and pushing him away and pushing him away, as I would have, then, done, to any guy who came at me like that, his hands too big like that;
there was a time the eggs did burn;
another time, a skillet hit the kitchen floor;
it was just a regular pan for frying;
there’s no reason to use the word skillet, which suggests a domesticity that wasn’t our kind;
it suggests a quaintness that wasn’t our thing;
that pan hit the kitchen floor so hard;
and the egg in the pan hit everything around us;
&nbs
p; our mother pushed our father away;
she said, I was trying to cook, said, Enough already, then he laughed that laugh, then she was pulling him in, then I had to leave the room;
on our first date, the guy and I went out to dinner;
it was an old-money place in the city;
he watched me chew my food;
he said, I love your mouth;
he had a thing, he said, for a certain mouth;
because his father, he said, had a thing for a certain mouth;
a certain mouth, said his father, was what you wanted;
I said, What does it mean, this certain mouth;
he said, What do you mean what does it mean;
he moved his chair closer to the table;
it was dark, and there was music;
the music was manipulative;
the drinks on the table were manipulative;
then there were more drinks on the table;
when he said, Let’s go, we went;
one might call this an obligation;
I might call it a disappointment;
I should call myself that disappointment;
me in the role of idealized me;
me as this girl we all want to fuck;
and were I not just a body like anyone else;
were I not just the parts of a body;
were I not just the parts of the parts;
there was a night I’d been out until late;
we looked at the guy until he looked back, and that was it;
when I got to the house later on, our father was at the door;
he was just getting in from a night, as well;
so it was like we had a secret;
we walked into the house together;
we went into our separate rooms;
I imagine both of us slept;
the next morning, we sat at the table;
it was me and my brother and our father;
our mother was at the stove;
a lot of time passed, us sitting there, waiting to be fed;
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