Something Wild

by Hanna Halperin

  She blinked back tears. Jesse’s face came into focus in her mind. Her future was clear, and it was with her husband.

  * * *

  —

  LORRAINE DOESN’T TELL NESSA all of this. She tells her most of it, though she leaves out certain details. She doesn’t tell her about her teeth falling out, or that she’s not allowed to have a Facebook. She tells her daughter that she no longer has a job, though she can’t bring herself to use the word fired. Her daughter looks scared and there’s no need to frighten her more. She doesn’t repeat to Nessa what Dr. Nathan said to her, after the dentist finished working on her mouth.

  “Get out, Lorraine,” she’d said, lifting up the blue surgical face mask, panic in the dentist’s voice. “I’m begging you. Woman to woman. Your life is in danger.”

  Tanya is running the risk of hitting somebody. She can’t hit her mother, she thinks bitterly—Jesse is already taking care of that. So if she hits someone it’s going to be Nessa—Nessa, who will never hit back. Tanya doesn’t understand Nessa’s attachment to Jesse. How it’s possible for her sister to love someone like Jesse. And it is love. She sees the way Nessa’s face softens when she’s around him, the way her eyes flicker over in his direction, looking for approval.

  Outside the sky is moody, copper with eggplant-colored clouds. Tanya gets in the car and drives, leaving her sister and mother stranded at the brewpub. She flies down Main Street, passing by the quaint shops, the little restaurants, not in the mood to feel charmed. When she reaches a patch of strip malls, she spots Walmart and pulls into the massive parking lot in search of something to eat.

  Inside, Tanya picks out a bag of baby carrots and a thing of hummus from the grocery section, and then she walks around the store, soothed by the air-conditioning and the shelves of toothpaste and tampons, paper goods and school supplies, everything in its place. The superstore is surprisingly calm. The aisles are large and clean. Her shoes click with each step.

  She hates this version of herself, the one she becomes when she’s around Nessa and Lorraine for too long. She begins to feel embarrassed by them. All their unhappiness starts to ooze out in small, unbearable ways. They become caricatures of themselves—their flaws exaggerated and magnified. All three of them crawl back into old, familiar roles, as though they’re playing some sort of re-creation game that’s neither fun nor necessary.

  Tanya finds herself in the baby aisle. She looks around at the receiving blankets, the diaper bags and creams and wipes, the pumps, the nursing pads. She doesn’t know what most of it is, and in that moment she feels furious at Eitan—for impregnating her, for wanting such a conventional life. She picks up a package of infant onesies and rips it open, pulls one out. It’s barely bigger than her own hand, with sleeves so small they make her gasp. Quickly, she stuffs the onesie back inside the package.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  Tanya whirls around. It’s an employee, a middle-aged man wearing a navy blue vest over a lighter blue button-up. “Are you planning on buying those?” he asks.

  Tanya shakes her head and puts the package back on the shelf. “I just wanted to see what size they were.”

  He smiles broadly and nods a few times, as though she’s told a joke. “Here at Walmart we have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to shoplifting.” He sounds practically jolly.

  “I wasn’t shoplifting,” she says. “But if it will make you happy, I’ll buy them.” She puts the package in her basket along with the carrots and hummus.

  The man takes several steps toward Tanya. “May I escort you to the register?”

  “I can find my way, thank you,” Tanya says.

  “I could use a little stroll myself. Let’s walk together.”

  Tanya gives the man her coldest stare and turns around, begins walking toward the front of the store. Behind her, she’s aware of him following her.

  “Pregnant?”

  She stops in her tracks. “Excuse me?”

  He’s caught up with her and he looks eagerly in her basket and then pointedly at her stomach. “Are you pregnant?”

  “That’s none of your business.” She glances at his name tag. “Tim.”

  “Don’t get upset,” he says brightly. Up close his eyes are small and bloodshot, and his eyelashes are so pale they’re white. “It’s a happy thing, having a baby.”

  “I’m going to the register now,” Tanya says. “Please don’t follow me. Do you understand?”

  The man’s eyes travel the length of her body. “I’m sorry I upset you.”

  “I’m not upset,” Tanya says. “I’m simply asking you to leave me alone.” She’s resolved to stay calm. Tanya turns on her heel and walks in the direction of the registers. She can feel his stare, branding her back.

  She doesn’t start to cry until she makes it to the front of the store where all the checkout lines are. She picks a line with a woman at the register and takes deep breaths, pressing her palms to her eyes, as if to quiet them. She’s furious, but she no longer knows at whom.

  Tanya leaves the package of onesies on the magazine rack and puts the carrots and hummus on the conveyer belt.

  “How are you today?” the woman at the register asks blandly.

  “Fine,” Tanya says. “And you?”

  “Good, thank you, ma’am. Will that be credit or debit?”

  “Credit,” Tanya says, and swipes her card.

  The interaction leaves her slightly calmed and, outside, she calls Nessa.

  “Hey,” Nessa answers. “Where are you?”

  “Walmart, down the road.”

  “I talked to Mom. She’s going to tell the judge about the strangulation.”

  Tanya exhales. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. “Good,” she says, and then she starts to cry again.

  “Are you okay?” Nessa says.

  “I’m coming back to the restaurant now,” Tanya says. “Let’s go back to the motel. This place creeps me out.” The feeling she’s having is the Wild Thing, but it feels too strange—too risky—to say these words aloud to Nessa.

  “Okay,” Nessa says. “Come pick us up and we’ll leave right away.”

  2003

  The idea started at their father’s apartment building, on the elevator ride down to the pool. Nessa was sixteen and Tanya had recently celebrated her fourteenth birthday. They hadn’t bothered with clothes or shoes, and when the elevator’s gold mirrored doors closed, Nessa and Tanya were faced with their own glowing reflection: Tanya in her white bikini, the length of her legs, the silky curtain of hair over her shoulder. And Nessa, taller and curvier, her breasts barely contained in her black one-piece, a bun perched on her head. They saw how beautiful they looked—not just each of them separately, but how they looked beside one another, a study in opposites. They laughed and posed and turned around to check out their backsides.

  On the way down to the lobby the elevator pinged and the doors opened to reveal two men. It was their clothing that made them men in Nessa’s mind, and not boys. They were dressed the way their father dressed for work—in button-up shirts and slacks, brown leather belts around their middles. They had facial hair, but not too much of it. Their eyes were bright and young.

  It was only a matter of seconds, but Nessa saw it on their faces, the way the men took them in, swallowing them; assessing, cataloging, imagining. It was as plain as the hair on their faces: Nessa and Tanya excited them.

  Then the men averted their gaze and stepped inside. The elevator closed again and all four of them stayed quiet—the men pretending not to look at Nessa and Tanya in the mirrored doors and Nessa and Tanya pretending not to see them looking. The air in the elevator thinned, then disappeared almost completely. There was the sound of their breath and the width of their shoulders; the perfect smell they gave off, of men’s deodorant and something musky and leafy and dark. They stood, each with a foot of s
pace between their feet, unlike Nessa and Tanya, who stood with their ankles and knees and thighs touching. By the time they reached the lobby, Nessa’s body was thrumming. The men stepped aside to let them walk out first, and she and Tanya bolted barefoot across the carpeted lobby, aware of the men behind them, watching their butts while they ran.

  * * *

  —

  “HOW OLD DO YOU THINK THEY WERE?” Nessa asked after they jumped in the pool.

  “Twenties?” Tanya floated on her back, her toes emerging from the water.

  “How old do you think they thought we were?”

  “Old,” Tanya said. “You definitely. With your boobs.”

  “They are kind of massive.” Nessa glanced down at her chest. “I don’t get it. Just two lumps of fat. What’s the big deal.”

  “I get it,” Tanya said, and she gazed thoughtfully at Nessa’s breasts. “They’re pretty.”

  Nessa looked down again and pulled at her suit, so that her right breast popped out. It did look pretty, soft and plump, half-submerged in water.

  Tanya watched Nessa and as though she had dared her, Tanya pulled her bikini top over her head. They both started to laugh, and in one fluid motion Nessa pulled down her suit and Tanya pulled off her bottoms and they threw their bathing suits over to the side of the pool.

  “I feel so free,” Nessa said, twirling in slow circles, the water kissing her all over.

  Tanya hoisted herself out of the pool. She stood naked and dripping on the edge and Nessa watched her, transfixed by her sister’s body—the beautiful neatness of it: the one-inch valley of space between her breasts; the gentle slopes of her hips; her belly button, a dainty moon-shaped blip. Tanya had always treated her body as something to be honed and perfected, something to be looked at and admired, but from a distance. Nessa felt not envy, looking at her sister’s body, but pride.

  Tanya glanced at the door and Nessa could tell her sister wanted someone to walk in. The men from the elevator. Or any man really.

  Then Tanya arched her back and stretched her arms over her head. She dove, disappearing into the pool so gracefully that when she broke the water, it was almost soundless.

  “What do you think those guys would do if they walked in right now?” Nessa asked Tanya after she came back up.

  “I don’t know.” Tanya glanced again at the door. “Maybe they’d swim with us.”

  Nessa looked down at her naked body, flickering under the shimmering blue. The details were obscured, but her shape was there. Nobody had ever looked at her the way those men in the elevator had, as though they had wanted to touch her.

  “What if no guy ever wants to have sex with me?” Nessa said, and though she meant it as a joke, out of nowhere her eyes were wet and her nose was burning and she wasn’t sure how she’d gone so quickly from happy to hopeless.

  “Of course guys will want to have sex with you,” Tanya said. “You just have to wait and find the right one.”

  Nessa nodded. She was tired of waiting. She knew her imagination so well that the stories she made up in her head no longer excited her. She had thought about the server from her father’s wedding too many times for him to still be an actual person. Now he was just an extension of herself—an outline of a boy she had filled in and invented, stale with her own bottomless longing. She’d spent hours, days—years, probably—of her life, imagining the right guy.

  “I guess worse comes to worst I could become a porn star,” Nessa said. “Or a prostitute.”

  Tanya laughed. “Yeah, right,” she said, and Nessa wondered if Tanya even knew what a porn star or a prostitute was.

  “How much do you think those guys would pay to have sex with us?” Nessa asked.

  “A million dollars.”

  “No, but actually. How much do you think?”

  “I don’t know. A hundred bucks?”

  “I was going to say fifty.”

  “We’re definitely worth more than fifty.” Tanya looked down at her naked body. “I mean, we’re hot.”

  “We are?”

  “Look at us.”

  “I kind of want to do it,” Nessa said.

  “What?”

  “Be a prostitute.” Nessa paddled to the edge of the pool and held on, treading water with her legs. “What if we did it?”

  “Have sex with those guys for money?”

  “No, not them. They live in Dad’s building. That would be too weird. We’d have to find other guys.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “We could make up hooker names,” Nessa said. “It would be fun. Like Crystal and Chandelier.”

  “Um, no.” Tanya laughed.

  “How about Paris and London?” Nessa said. “I could be Paris and you could be London.”

  “No, I think you’d be London and I’d be Paris.”

  “Fine,” Nessa said. “Or Lola and Layla.”

  “I like those.”

  Nessa started to imagine one of the men from the elevator undressing her, but she pushed the thought away. She didn’t want to imagine the life out of it.

  Tanya held on to the edge of the pool and fluttered her legs behind her. Her butt rose out of the water, two pink cheeks, smooth and wet. “Isn’t being a prostitute against the law, though?”

  Nessa thought about all the millions of pornos that men watched every day. She had watched one of them herself on the computer when no one was home. After watching porn the first time, she’d gone back and watched it again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, until she knew the video so well she could play it out in her head, shot by shot. “Not in Nevada,” she said.

  “I guess.”

  “Or Amsterdam.”

  “How would we even do it?” Tanya asked. “We can’t just go out on the street.”

  “We could make a website,” Nessa said, and that was when it turned from a joke into a plan.

  * * *

  —

  NEITHER ONE OF THEM KNEW enough about computers to make a website, so instead they created an email account, hottgirls@hotmail.com—they thought this was funny—and typed up a flyer. They settled on the names Lola and Layla and decided to slip flyers into a handful of mailboxes in Cambridge. They made the flyers at the public library, where Lorraine wouldn’t accidentally find them.

  They chose houses with poorly kept lawns, with broken venetian blinds instead of curtains. They checked the cars in the driveways, avoiding the Baby on Board and My Child Is an Honor Student bumper stickers, searching instead for cars that looked like they might belong to lonely men. Sometimes they peeked in windows, hoping to get glimpses of potential clients. Even the smallest movements of a person inside roused them into excited laughter.

  For weeks, nobody got in touch. They checked their email every day, multiple times. “Anything?” they asked each other sometimes. After a while they began to check less frequently, and the idea, the excitement of it, started to fade.

  * * *

  —

  THEN ONE DAY, a message came in. They were together, in the living room, when they discovered it, and when they saw the subject line, “Hello,” along with the time it had come through, 5:03 p.m., they both started to laugh. The idea that anybody would actually respond was ludicrous—unbelievable, even.

  “Oh my God,” Nessa said. “Should we open it?”

  “I don’t know,” Tanya said. “I’m scared.” But of course they opened it and read it together silently, grasping hands.

  “Hello,” it read. “My name is Dan. I am interested in meeting up. I am a nice guy in my 20s. Please write back so I know your real and not a hoax.”

  “He spelled ‘you’re’ wrong,” Tanya said.

  “Who cares,” Nessa said. She sat up. Her entire body was buzzing. She felt more awake than she’d felt in years. Dan, she thought, rolling the name
over in her mind.

  “I think we should write back,” Nessa said.

  “Really?” asked Tanya. “You don’t think it’s weird?”

  “His email sounds normal.”

  “Yeah, but.” Tanya glanced again at the computer screen, and Nessa saw a glint of sarcasm in her sister’s expression, and for some reason this hurt her feelings.

  “Tanya, we can’t back out now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” Nessa said. “It actually worked.”

  So they wrote an email back and set up a time to meet Dan at his house that night.

  “What are we supposed to wear?” Nessa asked.

  Tanya suggested they wear the kind of outfit they might wear to a school dance—short shorts with spaghetti-strap tank tops—and it was Nessa’s idea to go out and buy lingerie, since the guy, Dan, was probably expecting something out of the ordinary.

  Lorraine was at Jesse’s for the night and she’d left money for pizza. “We’re going to need more than this,” Tanya said, holding up the twenty-dollar bill on the kitchen counter.

  “Follow me,” Nessa said. They went upstairs to their mother’s bedroom and Nessa opened the small drawer in Lorraine’s night table. She knew her mother’s drawers intimately, from years of looking through them when Lorraine wasn’t home. There were a few twenties shoved into the back, along with a mess of crumpled receipts and business cards, coins furry with gum and lint, hair clips, lip balms. Nessa took two twenties and handed them to Tanya and then rifled around some more until she found the little blue plastic squares that she was looking for. “And these,” Nessa said, holding them up, and she could tell by the way Tanya looked at them, confused, that her sister had never seen a condom before.