When they could see the ocean again, he said, What the fuck are you laughing at? How was that funny? She said, Did you see his ribs? I swear to god, they looked like they’d exploded out of his chest and broken into wings. Did you fucking see that? And he watched her head rock back. And her eyes close. And her needing to say that. And her terrible out-of-whack beauty.
* * *
• • •
YEAR FIVE.
As you know incarcerations.
As you know the roof of your own mouth.
As you know the fingers you use to touch yourself.
As you know what hurts and what you want to hurt toward pleasure.
As you know the stupid line that does not exist there.
As you know the spit in your mouth.
As you know going down on a woman. Age fifteen. Age twenty. Age thirty.
As you know his mouth will never be her mouth.
As you know his taste will never be hers.
As you know your teeth clenching, wishing, wanting, biting.
As you know the scars you carry.
As you read the Braille of your own body, self-inscription.
As you know the scripts we are given fold in on themselves: This is a woman.
As you know vodka pooling in your mouth better than saliva.
As you know the word “want” as an entire lexicon.
As you know the weight of your left arm, the pull, the mastery of your right hand, the tubing in your teeth, the skill of your fingers at work, the flesh taking the stab, the vein pulsing toward rupture, the breathing slowing in your lungs, the nod, the warm air rushing up your throat, your skull, the sockets of your eyes, you nearly swallowing your own teeth, my god, the knowing, the rain let loose to pure body, her knowing, the first shot received as a child, the not crying, the fascination, the looking up with the eyes of a child at a beautiful man in white, his giving.
This is what a woman wants. This is wanting. Be good.
As you know sentences will fail.
As you know to take a needle and cum.
From that.
Need driving you.
Shooting.
* * *
• • •
YEAR SIX. Motherfucker. Mother. Fucker. The phrase “detox for Recovering Catholics.” They gave her a roommate with red hair. She wanted her. She watched her in her sleep and masturbated under white sheets. Her hands alive and unflinching. The redheaded woman became her need. Her drive. She lunged, propelled herself across their room, over linoleum and white, over sterile and clean—too clean—shock-backed floors and walls.
Turned out the redhead was awake too. Sweating. Corpselike in a pool of herself. Breathing in rapid bursts. Her hands on fire.
They devoured each other, nearly, like animals locked up.
Next day they would sit in a semicircle with other women, black circles under every eye. Most were smoking. Legs thrown out in front of them at odd angles. Mouths, eyes, all saying resist resist resist. Hearts saying fuck you fuck you fuck you fast or slow.
She would think goddamn it, then lines that mimic that phrase: Dogs have it, Go bang it, Fuck bag it, Gun big it. She’d laugh. Is something funny, L? Did you have something to say? Do you think maybe laughter is your cover story? Huh? Let’s hear about it. C’mon. Show us some guts. Take a risk for once in your life. Tell us something we don’t know. You mad? You got some rage in you that you think is special?
Cunt throb it.
Hand ram it.
Lead blood it.
Goddamn it.
She was forced to stay an extra four months for carving GODDAMN IT into her arm with a sharpened and resharpened pencil.
* * *
• • •
THE LOST YEAR. She was in the parking lot of Our Lady of Little Flowers Church. She was there for a commitment ceremony. He asked, What’s a commitment ceremony? She called him a dumb fuck. It’s when two queer people want to love each other in public. He didn’t say anything, then did. She’d been clean nine months. Does it mess with you? What? That she’s marrying someone else? Someone not you? Or that you married me? Is that it? Was that it? Does that make you feel incarcerated or something?
All she heard in her head was blood pounding goddamn it goddamn it goddamn it, driving her crazy, making her brain propel itself down the rivers of her body into the veins in her arm into lines like what is a woman what is a woman what am I?
* * *
• • •
YEAR EIGHT. Driving in the desert. For all she was worth. With her whole body. Her mind gone wild. Her hair like fire. Her cells dividing, in rage or love or just plain need. She drove most of the year. Or at least it seemed that way.
* * *
• • •
YEAR NINE. What was shooting? To cause to be projected, to cause to fire, to kill by doing this, to wound by doing this, to put to death with a bullet as punishment, to hunt, to destroy or move with a projectile. To project something forward, out, toward. To direct with the rapidity of a moving bullet. To put into action. To detonate. To photograph. To increase in speed. To flash across the sky. To dart painfully in or through a part or parts of the body.
* * *
• • •
YEAR TEN. Pulled over on the shoulder. Flat tire. Her ordinary arms change a tire on an ordinary car. Then into her vision comes somebody pulling over. Was it her hair that drew them, driving out in blond tracks against the sky? It is a man, she thinks, a beautiful man, his hair long and windblown. He gets out of his car and from the knee down his legs get bigger and bigger. When he is a foot away from her, he stops. Then and only then she looks up. Up from the black leather boot to the bottom cuff of his jeans up his shin to his knee to his thigh up his denim to his cock. Then up his belly his torso his collarbone she pictures under his T-shirt and then up to his jaw his mouth his eyes. His whole face. Then his lips. They could be anyone’s lips. They could be hers.
“It looks like you could use,” is all she hears.
She lets this random man help her even though she doesn’t need. His arms working are beautiful. His hands. The insides of his arms. His veins cording across his arms more familiar than his face.
When he is finished, he says, “Do you want to score?”
And it hits her. Shoots through her. The past wants. Like a mouth salivating. Like a cunt begging. Like the weight of an arm. Like the next sentence. Like a faith that won’t be arrested. The past can break her body no matter what, can move her, propel her, speed her, drive her open, the past’s needing, no stopping it.
She bends down to tend to the tire. She screws the new tire in tight, pockets the wrench, slips back into her car, and drives.
A WOMAN APOLOGIZING
She shut the silver cuff round her right wrist. It was done: wrists cuffed to brass. All there was left to do now was wait; 5:25, or 5:45 at the latest, if he missed the first train. Her wrists clanked against the brass bedposts. She pulled her arms out away from the bed, and her wrists just clinked, trapped, secure, something she couldn’t quite name. She smiled. She rattled her little wrists. She put her chin to her chest and looked down the length of her body. Her breasts flattened like fried eggs, each slipping toward its own armpit. Her rib cage rose and fell. Her belly dipped down like a flesh bowl. The curls of her pubes crinkled up toward air. She could feel herself becoming wet already. She spread her legs as far apart as they would go; her lips sucked open, the air opened her, she wiggled her toes in delight. She grinned at herself, by herself, to herself.
It had been, after all, a terrible argument. His face was darker than she had ever seen it, his teeth clicking between his words. He had been shirtless. Yeah, she had thought, he’s pumping up with anger at me, pulsing toward rupture at me, to me, about me. And she was angry as well—her too-pale skin all blotchy at the neck and chest, blood boomi
ng in each ear. She saw her own hands flare and fan in front of her like deranged birds now and again. She screamed so hard she felt the cords in her neck strain and screech, almost cracking against themselves. What a fight, one of those wonderful horrible ones.
She knew he was right. She was a control freak. It was true, if she asked him where he wanted to eat and he told her, inevitably she would say, Well, we could go there, but the wine selection is so much better at this other place, and he would of course agree. If she asked him what he wanted to do and he said, How about a movie? of course she would say, All right, but then we’ll miss the free jazz in the park. If he wanted eggs, she asked for pancakes; if he drove the car, she knew a better route; if he wanted to be on the bottom, she clamped his hips between her bony little knees and tugged until he rolled to the top; and if he wanted to be on top, she squirmed out from under like a chipmunk escaping a cat. And when he said, You don’t understand what it’s like to be black, she would say, You don’t know what it’s like to be a woman, and there was nothing he or anyone else could say to that.
But that day he’d just had it, he said, and he threw a glass of gin to the floor when she said, Jesus, but she was tired of having to decide everything for the two of them. The second the words left her mouth, she knew she ought to suck them back in, but it was too late, and he just snapped. And then she really blew it: She said, as if she didn’t know not to, You must really feel a need to attack me. And then thought, What a jerk. Why can’t I just let the fight go on naturally? Honestly, just quit the debate tactics and listen, that’s what he always told her, and he was right. She didn’t want to lose him, after all, he was the only good thing in her whole rotten life. If she could just develop a self to police the self that kept screwing up, a little invisible self that could stop the real her just in time.
So after he grabbed his blue shirt like a flag and slammed the door shut on her, she was left sitting there with her marvelous anger and her stupid control. She bit the inside of her cheek as hard as she could and closed her eyes tight enough for tears and pounded the top of her head, saying, Dumb, dumb, dumb.
She tried to think how to apologize—make him stir-fry and flan for dessert? spill rose petals from the door to the bubble-filled bath?—but nothing felt serious enough. How to make it up to him, how to exorcise her controlling witch-self?
How proud she was when she finally thought of it: an act of total submission. What sweeter gift could a controlling woman give a wounded man? She was so excited that she ran out that minute, caught the subway up several more blocks—they’d been there dozens of times, admiring the nipple clamps, fingering the leather, faces flushing at the plugs. They loved these stores, loved to be in them, loved to buy gels and magazines and arcane contraptions and then go home and work each other into lather and sweat and dripping delirium. She remembered the night they bought a piercing kit—how she squeezed the skin around his nipple, how the beautiful dark bump rose like a kiss toward her, how she slid the silver point through to the other side as their foreheads pressed together. She remembered the night he bent over her like a tender archaeologist, how she sat up on her elbows trying to see, though all she could really make out was his furrowed brow, his eyelashes, the top of his head, his fingers working as the point went through her without a sound. And then, when he was finished, he dipped his sweet dark face down into the sweet dark mouth, mouth to mouth, she would never forget. She bought the cuffs and ran all the way home, dreaming of their new forgiveness.
Five-twenty now, and she was hot all over. Soon I’ll be sweating, she thought. Her wrists twisted loosely inside their cuffs. She felt the tingle between her belly and her spine. Almost by accident she noticed the buzzing voices and shifting images of the TV. She had forgotten it, so busy she was staging herself, trying to decide where to put the keys (between her legs), what position her legs should be in, throwing them around to find an alluring pose. But now she realized she’d left it on the twenty-four-hour news channel. It’s fine, she thought. Something mindless to distract from the waiting.
She had to hold her head a little to the side, peer around the bedposts, but she could make out what was going on. What was going on was war. Which war was difficult to say—the sound was barely audible, so she only had images to go by—but it was a wintry place, close-up shots of soldiers showing icicled mustaches and beards. The men looked pale blue and dirty and tired, more tired than she could imagine. Some of the faces were talking to the camera, and though she couldn’t hear any words, she could see their beaten faces, resigned to something beyond sight. A village peppered with bodies, bloody snow. A dog sniffing at potatoes spilled from a bag clutched by a bulky bundled woman, her head shrouded in a flower-printed scarf. All perfectly dead, fallen where shot, knee-deep in snow in the middle of their lives.
Whatever war it was, it soon gave way to panels of heads and mouths and waves of commentary. The mediascape of winners and losers and statistics, of men and women in suits, as if their pin-straight hair had wiped this week’s war off the screen.
She closed her eyes and bit the inside of her cheek, because it was 5:40 and he wasn’t home yet and she suddenly realized she was freezing.
She looked up at the ceiling, down to her nipples standing up against the cold, over to the window now black with night, but the TV kept pulling like a hungry child. Five-fifty and she had to concentrate, had to distract her imagination to keep it from slipping into the nasty mind-wander of paranoia when your lover is not in the doorway. Now a tingling in her flesh: Was her own skin trying to tell her something? She jerked her wrists in a kind of death rattle against the slow fear crawling up her spine. He’s stopping to buy a bottle of wine, a rosé. He’s getting cash to take her to dinner. He missed the first train, he ran into a heavy crowd, the sky opened up and thickened the air, everyone outside is walking in slow motion.
By six she was really cold, and the shivering was taking all her energy so that her brain wouldn’t work right. It kept stuttering and lurching, and out of frustration she went back to the TV. But the TV hadn’t changed at all, it was the same news, or different news with the same faces, as if all over the world the news had the same actors: gaunt, icy faces, bulky women falling into death, sniffing dogs, eyes that were always black, buildings blasted beyond architecture. Why hadn’t the news changed since she last looked? Who were these actors in wars that never ended? She grew agitated over the repeating images, until she finally decided she would stare at the set until they changed. There must be sports news, after all. Or bad weather. Weather always changed the picture.
But they just kept coming and coming, six-fifteen, six-thirty, and when she finally closed her eyes and shook her head, trying to shut them out, she realized she was shivering. At seven she wept, slowly at first, but by seven-thirty she had snot running down her trough and all around her mouth. She was saying his name in low, whimpery wails, she was losing the feeling in her arms, her fingertips were prickling, she was quivering and hiccupping and shutting her eyes from the TV, the awful twenty-four hours of news, the news and the cold and the cuffs and the loss of circulation and the waiting that could be the rest of her out-of-control life. And he kept on not coming home, and if he didn’t, then what?
MECHANICS
How’d you get the name Eddie?
She’s eyeing my name tag. From the get-go I feel her contradiction. She says her husband usually brings the car in, and sure as shit she’s got a stupid diamond on her ring finger, but she’s also all lash extensions, lip stud, push-up bra, and full sleeve of tats on her right arm—classic femme. Maybe the husband is a cover story.
Father gave it to me, I say, continuing my work. Edwina.
She moves closer. Most people drop their cars off, throw their hands up, walk away with that please please please don’t let this cost an arm and a leg. I don’t know what she wants, but I already like the way she wants to stick around and watch, to see what’s going on, even if
she doesn’t get it. I mean, when she came into the garage, she told me, The car makes a strange sound when I shift the gears. What kind of sound? I asked. This is usually where people make asses of themselves, trying to sound like a sick motor. But she said, You know that noise you hear when your alarm goes off in the morning, only you’re not awake yet so you don’t exactly hear it, you sense it, something between a buzz and a ring, and for a moment you don’t know if it’s a hangover or a dream or the phone or the alarm or an insect or a snore? I had to admit I knew what she meant. I overslept a lot. Didn’t help me worth a shit to guess what was wrong with the car, but it did make me curious. She knew what she was talking about, even though she didn’t.
So when she came over to where I was under the hood, I said, Could you hand me that lug wrench? She picked the tool up and looked at it a long time before she handed it to me. She got some oil on her hand, and she looked at that too.
I worked on her car. She stayed very near. So, she says, how long did it take you to learn to be a mechanic? Now she is making circles with her ring finger in a blob of oil near the battery. She’s leaning right under the hood with me.
Better watch all that hair, I said, then answered: I picked it up real fast. Think I had a knack for it. I’ve been around a garage all my life, it seemed natural. My dad owned a garage. The oil, the smell of gasoline, the chrome, the black innards of an engine. I was helping with repair work by the time I was twelve.
Were there other girls helping with the repair work? she wants to know.
I laugh. Nope. Just me.
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