by Kelly Fordon
He got up.
“Join me,” he said, holding out his hand.
I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do less.
“I need to talk to my friend first,” I said.
I dragged Connie down the hall to the bathroom.
I told her I wanted to go home. She was leaning into the sink studying her own reflection in the mirror. Her eyeliner had dripped down into fang marks. She took a wet towel and attempted to clean herself up. When she turned around to look at me, her eyes were bright red and the liner had formed wings that extended from the corners of her eyes to her hairline.
“Don’t be a dumbass.” She took a cigarette out of her purse. Her hand trembled so violently that I had to light the cigarette for her.
“This is the moment you’ve been waiting for,” she said, inhaling deeply. “Life is short. I should know.”
“He’s a weirdo,” I said. “It was terrible.”
“Well, you never have to see him again. Just have some fun.”
“It’s not fun. I just told you, it was terrible.”
“That’s because you don’t know what you’re doing yet. You have to practice. Work it. Work it. Work it.” She attempted a dance move from an Olivia Newton-John video, but she didn’t see the trash can and she stumbled into it, banging her head on the towel dispenser.
Peter was waiting for me when we emerged from the bathroom.
“Join me?” he said, holding out his hand.
Just then, Sue appeared, slipping past us to enter the bathroom. I followed her back in and stood outside her stall.
“Help me,” I said. “Get me out of here.”
“Seal the deal. I don’t know why you’re being such a prude.”
“I’m not.”
She emerged from the stall and headed over to the mirror.
“Listen,” I said. “He held me down and just ground away on me. It was disgusting.”
“He’s frustrated.” She fluffed her hair and pulled a lipstick out of the pocket of her jeans. “They all get like that. And who could blame him? You led him on.”
“It’s bullshit. I’m not having fun, and I’m going home.”
When I exited the bathroom, he was still standing there.
I let out a small shriek.
“I can be a really nice guy,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve proven that to you. This time we’ll just talk. I promise.”
Sue had followed me out and was standing behind me. “Go ahead, you freak!” she said, pushing me gently toward him.
I returned to his room. This is the point in this story where I’d like to offer some excuse. But there is no excuse. I went back.
This time, after a prolonged make out session, he forced my head between his legs. I had attended enough tutorials in the Lodge to know what was expected of me, but no one had mentioned anything about the unpleasant sensation of having one’s head forced down between a boy’s legs. The cool girls had always maintained that fellatio was the preferred outcome: consummation for the boy; 100 percent effective birth control for the girl. They hadn’t mentioned anything about gagging.
While I was wondering how to get out of the situation, someone opened the door.
Peter let go of my head. I pulled back and scooted down to the other end of the bed. A boy stood in the doorway staring down at us.
“Sorry,” the boy said. He turned around, shutting the door behind him.
Peter grabbed hold of my shirt and pulled me back toward him. I said I had to go. He held on to my shirt and reached up under my skirt. I pressed my hands down over his, trying to push them away.
“I don’t want that,” I said.
“Yes, you do.” He grabbed my wrist with one hand and my tights with the other, yanking them down to my ankles. I tried to get up, but he had maneuvered his knee between my legs and was lying on top of me, using his body weight to pin me to the bed.
It all seemed to happen at once. The hands, the penetration, his hot breath. I said stop. Not because I realized he was doing something wrong, but because I could not handle the pain. The bed moved back and forth, up and down. At some point the picture of Jesus crashed to the floor. When I heard the glass shatter, I realized I really had summoned the Devil. He flipped me over onto my stomach and ground my face into the mattress. I stopped struggling because it hurt less when I was still. I don’t know how long it continued after that before someone else opened the door.
“What’s going on in here?” the person said.
Peter sat up. I was still face down, but I quickly rolled over and reached for the covers, wrapping them around my waist. I stood up, hitting my head on the metal rim of the top bunk, and saw that it was Peter’s roommate standing in the doorway. I don’t know why he came back. All these years later, I still wonder what he made of the scene.
I ran out of the room, down the hall, down the stairs, out of the building, and across the field with the thin bedcover wrapped around my waist. I don’t remember if anyone saw me. It was still light out, so I must have passed other people. I ran to the fence where we’d left our backpacks. I dropped the cover on the ground and adjusted my clothing. Then, I ran the whole ten blocks home, where my mother had just gotten off the phone with Sister Veronica.
I was grounded for three months for skipping my afternoon classes and hopping the fence. Connie was grounded for a while too, but then her mother died. Sue didn’t get in any trouble at home. Her mother had missed Sister Veronica’s call, and Sue had erased the message. In lieu of suspension, the three of us spent the next three weekends scrubbing the school’s wooden porch floors with toothbrushes. Later that year, Sue hopped the fence again and was expelled.
Though I had been going to confession regularly before Peter, I didn’t return afterward because I could not imagine telling the priest what I had done. Some weeks later, my class was sent down to the chapel for a special confession. It was unusual to have a priest on campus offering confession. It must have been a Holy Day. When I entered the cubicle, the hot dank air felt like hands all over my body. The priest slid the screen open.
“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” I said. “It has been two months since my last confession.”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“I’ve lied to my mother and I didn’t clean up the kitchen when she asked me to. Also, I argued with her. And with my dad a couple of times. I’m sorry.”
After, I finished, there was a long pause. I watched the priest, waiting for some movement, but he remained motionless, his head bowed. Finally, without looking up or opening his eyes, he asked, “How old are you, young lady?”
“Fifteen,” I said.
“Fifteen?”
“Yes, Father.”
“You’re fifteen years old, and you really expect me to believe that’s all you’ve done?”
I don’t expect you to believe anything, is what I later wished I had said. But I was too young to fight back. I just stood up without another word and drew the curtain aside. I couldn’t wait to escape that box.
Get a Grip!
Maura Elliot finished cleaning up the TV room and brought some dishes down to the kitchen sink. When she looked up from the soapy water, she saw that May Keane, her zany neighbor, was waving frantically to her from the kitchen window across the driveway.
May Keane lived next door with her mother Suzanne and her entire life seemed to consist of walking to CVS and back, anywhere from four to six times a day. The word on the street was that May Keane had addled her mind with drugs when she was an undergraduate, but none of the neighbors had ever asked her mother, Suzanne, directly.
Each time May Keane left the house, she sported a jaunty canary-yellow beret and a bright pink pocketbook, which she gripped tightly as if warding off assault. Maura had no idea why everyone called her May Keane and not simply May, but it may have been because sometimes when May Keane wandered off in the wrong direction, Suzanne could be heard screaming, “May Keane! May Keane!” from the doorway as if May
Keane was six, not closing in on fifty.
Maura waved back to May Keane and then looked down fixedly at the dishes. When she looked up a couple of seconds later, May Keane was still waving, so she waved again half-heartedly and moved away from the window. She would finish the dishes later when not under surveillance.
Later that morning Maura stood at the side door saying goodbye to her children as they got on the bus. She had not left her house in four months. She’d been fine for a little while after Howard had deserted her, but then, one morning, when she went to the door, she found she just could not go through it. It had been the same every day since.
It was possible to remain sequestered because of grocery deliveries and her oldest son, Mike, who’d acquired his license a year earlier. Mike loved driving and never balked at carting his little sister Liz around, especially when Maura paid him so well to do it. Mike and Liz were so caught up in their own high school dramas that sometimes Maura wondered if they even realized she was housebound. They knew that their father had moved out, but they seemed to operate under the notion that if they said nothing about it, it wasn’t real. Maybe they were just relieved not to be subjected to his mood swings any longer. In either case, neither one had asked her a single thing about him since the day of his departure when she had briefly explained he would be working out of the Dallas office for the next few months.
Today, she did what she’d been doing every day since her agoraphobia had set in. She took out her endless to-do list and attacked the house. She cleaned, she mopped, she descended into the depths of the basement and sifted through fifteen years of detritus, sorting and discarding as much as she could. While she worked, she hummed along with WMJZ, the classical music station.
For ten years before she’d gotten married and had kids, she’d worked as an architect at Cole Redding. Now the only place she would allow her mind to go was into the buildings she’d designed. While she worked, in her mind she was roaming the rooftop garden and atrium at the Marygrove plant admiring the ceramic glazed bricks, the neoprene gaskets they’d used in lieu of caulk, the futuristic water towers. Other than future and past designs, she refused to contemplate anything else except the next task at hand. When she ran out of chores, she made up more—washing the walls, unearthing and polishing the never-used silver.
For the most part, this was the same way she’d operated during the late stages of her marriage. If she did not want to hear what Howard was saying, she could carry on whole conversations with him without processing a single word. It was as if someone had drilled a hole in the base of her head so that his words dripped out like water from the bottom of a flowerpot. What he was saying—that he wanted to leave, that he loved someone else, that he felt like he was “self-actualizing” and she was not—washed right through her leaving no residue at all.
Around 11 a.m., the doorbell rang. Maura heard it, but she was nearly finished with her final load of laundry. Assuming it was the UPS man, she ignored it. But then it rang again. And again. And again.
“Shit!” she muttered, tossing a pair of balled-up socks into the basket. Who could be that rude? She located her button-down sweater and put it on over her T-shirt, buttoning it up to the collar. She smoothed out some creases in her khakis and put on her loafers. Then she hurried downstairs and opened the door.
It was May Keane. She was clutching the pocketbook and peering repeatedly over her shoulder. Without acknowledging Maura, she threw open the screen door and scurried past her into the house.
“The meeting is starting,” she called out, sounding frantic. “Should have started at 9 a.m. You’re late! Sit down. Sit down. Wait! You better make coffee. Did you get the pastries? Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!”
Maura was alarmed, but she talked herself out of it almost immediately. After all, she had no reason to believe May Keane was dangerous. She’d lived next door to the woman for five years without incident.
“May Keane,” she said. “There is no meeting going on here. I think you are mistaken. Where is your mother?”
“She went to the land of Costco, where all of her dreams come true,” May Keane said, walking quickly on into the dining room. Maura followed her. In the dining room, May Keane took a seat at the table so that she was facing the wall. Maura continued around to the other side of the table to get into her line of sight.
“Would you like something to drink, May Keane?” Maura said. She needed an excuse to leave the room and call Suzanne from the kitchen.
“Yes,” May Keane said, “I’d like a jasmine tea with a side of lime or cucumber, if you have it.” She placed her purse on the table in front of her but kept her hands clasped tightly around it.
Maura went into the kitchen and located Suzanne’s cell phone number on the list taped to the refrigerator. Suzanne answered breathlessly on the first ring, as if accustomed to emergency calls.
Suzanne sighed as Maura told her what was going on.
“Well, that’s a first,” she said. “Normally she doesn’t like to interact with people.”
This was true. May Keane had never spoken to Maura before. Sometimes she seemed to recognize Maura and the kids, and other times she hurried past them looking terrified, as if they were wild animals on the loose.
“I’m in the checkout line at Costco,” Suzanne said. “I’ll be there as fast as I can . . . it’ll probably take me twenty minutes. I’m sorry. I know you have your hands full as it is. Just humor her.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, in her world . . . I guess what I’m saying is . . . just go along with it . . . she has an active imagination.” The answer was so disjointed that Maura was reminded of a supposition she’d made about Suzanne, whose thin hair blew this way and that in the wind, and whose outfits were always mismatched, oversized and dumpy looking. The supposition was that living with the daughter had unhinged the mother.
Maura went back into the dining room. She’d forgotten about the tea, but May Keane reached up to take it anyway.
“Thanks so much,” she said, taking hold of the imaginary cup, simulating a stirring motion and then leaning down to make loud sipping noises.
“Delicious. Just right! You did it perfect!” she said.
Suddenly, her head whipped around. “You hear that?” she said. “They’re here! They’re here!”
Before Maura could react, May Keane backed up, scraping her chair on the wood floor.
Maura winced and followed her to the door, inadvertently catching a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror. With the rings under eyes and her black hair pulled back into a bun, she looked like a nun.
“It’s a man,” May Keane said. She was on her tiptoes peering through the peephole. “I think it’s your guy.”
“My guy?” Maura asked.
“Your guy who lives here,” May Keane said.
“I don’t have a guy anymore,” Maura said. Howard had left her for his malnourished, bucktoothed secretary. It was a pathetic story, so cliché that when people asked what happened, she lied rather than tell them the stupid, sordid truth.
May Keane opened the door, and of course, there was no one there. But Maura’s heart had done a little flip as the door swung open, and she immediately chastised herself for having any anticipation at all at the thought of seeing Howard.
“Come in, come in,” May Keane said, waving an unseen person into the room. “Have a seat in the dining room. The meeting is just about to start. Isn’t it great to see him!” she said, as she passed Maura on her way back to the dining room.
“Who?” Maura asked.
“Your man! Your man!” May Keane said.
“My man is not my man any longer,” Maura said. “He lives in Texas.”
“So, what are you doing here in Michigan?” May Keane said to the empty dining room chair where the imaginary man was presumably just taking a seat.
She cocked her head and listened for a minute. Then turned back to Maura and whispered, “Who’s he talking to on that cell phone any
way? Seems to me he ought to pay more attention to the people standing right in front of him, you know?”
Maybe May Keane had picked up on Howard’s cell phone addiction; maybe she had been watching her neighbors more closely than Maura had realized. If she’d known that, she definitely would have shelled out money for the expensive plantation shutters.
May Keane sat down at the dining room table and looked over at the spot where invisible Howard was sitting. Maura looked down at her watch. Fifteen minutes until Suzanne rescued her. She really wanted to get that laundry done. After that, her plan had been to finish re-grouting the basement bathroom shower stall. It had been an ambitious undertaking for one day, even without an interruption of this magnitude.
“Oh! There goes the door again!” May Keane said, popping up.
“I don’t hear it,” Maura said, then remembered Suzanne had warned against insisting on reality.
May Keane hurried to the door and looked through the peephole.
“Good God!” she cried, flinging the door open.
“Who’s there?” Maura asked.
May Keane didn’t respond. She gaped open mouthed at the door. Then she stepped aside and waved another hallucination into the room.
“Who’s there?” Maura asked again.
“Stedman forgot to let the dogs out,” May Keane whispered to Maura. “That’s why she’s late.”
“Oprah?” Maura asked, stifling a short, nervous giggle.
May Keane put her arm up in midair, around what she must have believed to be a shoulder. “I watched you every day, Oprah,” she said. “Every single day. Why’d you go off the air? Huh?”
When they reached the dining room, May Keane pointed to one of the empty chairs.
“Maura’s man! Maura’s man! Hey you! Get off that phone! Oprah’s here!”
May Keane pulled out a chair. “Would you like me to get some coffee?” she said to the empty seat. She cocked her head then turned to Maura.
“She doesn’t drink coffee. Do you have some peppermint tea?”
Maura nodded and headed to the kitchen. Once there, she stood next to the oven. She felt a bead of sweat trickle down her back. She thought about a church she’d read about in Belgium designed with thin sheets of steel to give the illusion of transparence. When viewed from different angles, the church disappeared completely. The architects said they were exploring the idea that not seeing something doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Perhaps they’d like to hear May Keane’s thoughts on that.