Dull Pain
Some pains dull over time, becoming a part of the mechanics of the body, but mine never dulled. It just grew, flowering over parts of me I never knew were connected to my vagina. My joints ached. My head pounded, even in my sleep, and whether it was hot or not, I woke with sheets sticking to my skin. After two months, I had to tell Momma. Whatever was wrong was spreading through my body. I was too ill to read, eat, or go outside. Nausea had replaced sensations of hunger, and my muscles had begun twitching even as I lay still in bed. I found Momma in her bedroom, resting before she had to go to work.
“Momma, something’s wrong with me,” I began. “My privates are itching and it hurts when I pee.”
“Huh?” Momma’s brow shot up as she eyed me standing at her door. “When did this start?”
“It started hurting out of nowhere. I don’t know why.”
“You having sex?” she asked, squinting her right eye, twisting her lips into a frown.
“No ma’am, I’m still a virgin,” I said too loudly.
Momma didn’t look convinced, just tired. “Okay, I’ll make you an appointment at the doctor’s. Probably just got a yeast infection or a UTI. We’ll see.”
On the day of my appointment, I walked a little lighter, smiled harder, and skipped to classes. I was going to be healed. The doctor would make all of the burning go away. I wondered how long it would take to get used to a normal, pain-free life. I looked forward to counting the days.
My doctor was a pediatrician on High Street, so Momma caught the bus to Wilson and we walked there. Cars whizzed by as we journeyed past Maryview Hospital, past Greater Grinders Subs, into a world I’d never seen before. In that majestic neighborhood, trees overlapped each other, forming a tunnel over the narrow street. Large houses sat on each corner with grass that looked like green, rippling waves. Shiny cars with names I didn’t recognize sat pristine in each driveway. Some peeked from the insides of garages also holding mowers, ten-speed bikes, and motorcycles. No people loitered on the corner. I saw no dirt anywhere and wondered if all of theirs had been transported to Lincoln Park.
I bet girls who lived in those houses didn’t itch and burn like I did. Girls in those homes weren’t anyone’s “pretty red young thang” and they’d never been as hungry as I had been. Would I ever be one of those girls? I wondered. Momma wasn’t one of their mothers, so probably not.
We walked until we reached a small house on the corner. If the “Pediatrics” sign hadn’t been there, I would have thought it was just another home. A clanging bell dinged when we walked in. It was an inviting place, with chocolate paint enveloping the room. The carpet was a shade lighter, but soft, under my sneakered feet. Posters of smiling children covered the walls and in a corner were primped dolls sitting in a line next to Tonka trucks and alphabet blocks. Nursery rhymes keyed on a piano played in the background.
All of a sudden, I felt too old. Problems like mine did not belong in a place like that. My illness required white walls, tiled floors, elevator music slinking through speakers. As Momma talked to the receptionist, I sank my butt into one of the plush chairs lining the wall. Relief, I thought, as I shifted my weight from side to side, allowing the cushion to scratch what I couldn’t in public.
I watched the receptionist’s expression turn from a smile to a strained grin when Momma handed her my Medicaid card. I would normally have rolled my eyes at the woman once Momma sat down, but I didn’t want to ruin my chances of seeing the doctor. Finally, the nurse called us into the office, took my vitals, and asked what was wrong. Momma sat in the seat next to me and listened as I spoke.
“It hurts when I pee. Burns, itches, and sometimes I bleed,” I said. Momma looked on as I ran down the list of my ailments. I waited to see if her expression would change, to see if she’d link my symptoms to something other than a yeast infection, and rise from her seat ready to slap me for lying. She didn’t.
Soon after the nurse finished her scribbling, the doctor knocked on the door and peeked in. “Hello, Laurie,” he said. “Can you get on the examination table so I can check you out?” I imagined checking me out would lead to a cure, so I almost yelped in pleasure. My excitement was short-lived when the doctor took out his stethoscope, tested my reflexes, and felt around my neck.
“Okay, painful urination, itching, bleeding? Can you see where the blood’s coming from?”
I shook my head no.
“Are you having sex?”
I had anticipated that question. “No, sir,” I said, shaking my head for emphasis.
“She’s a virgin,” Momma announced proudly.
“Probably just a yeast infection or urinary tract infection. We’ll be able to clear this up quickly.”
Momma nodded in agreement. I nodded too, until the doctor began making his way to the door.
“You’re not going to look at it?” I asked, panicked. What if he was wrong? What if it wasn’t a UTI or yeast infection and he wouldn’t know unless he examined me.
“No need,” the doctor said. “You’re a virgin.” In that moment, I realized I’d hurt myself more than anyone could have. I almost began crying on the table, but Momma squeezed my hand.
“You’ll be good to go, girly. I’ve had those before and they heal up fast once you get the medicine.” I couldn’t cry after Momma said that. Then, she’d know.
That night Momma filled my prescription of pills and Monistat cream. I took the pills as soon as I got them, but waited until bedtime, as Momma had instructed, to insert the cream. I sat on the toilet, legs parted, plastic applicator in hand, cream pressed to the top. Before I did the deed, I prayed the medicine would work, that it would act like a fire hose, a whole fire company, extinguishing the blaze that had left my fields raging. I lowered the applicator, fingered the plunger and pushed.
My body convulsed as my legs snapped closed. Using my free hand to pry them open, I rose from the toilet slowly. I wanted to keep the cream where it would do the most good, but I immediately learned that was a mistake. If I were on fire before, now I, a flame, had been dropped into a vat of gasoline. My armpits itched, burned, the bottom of my feet too. My nail beds, in between my fingers, my ears, eyes—everything was on fire. I clawed in between my legs, trying to grab what I could with my fingers. I filled the applicator with cold water, once, twice, so many times I felt as if I were drinking from the wrong side.
I couldn’t feel anything down there but swelling. Everything else was numb. For that I was grateful. Later that night, I lay in the fetal position, my knees pulled as tightly to my chest as I could get them. I was naked, hoping the air would cool me where I burned most.
After a week of the pills with no relief, I went to Momma again. She made me another appointment, but this one I went to alone. The doctor went through the same routine, asking the same questions, prescribing different medications. He prescribed cream after cream, suppositories, pills so many I was raw by my third visit. He smiled each time, assured me I’d be cured, and sent me home. One day I just stopped going, just stopped trying, just stopped caring. I was burnt out.
The pain had become so excruciating, Greg and I stopped having sex altogether, which meant our relationship was over. It had outlived itself anyway. I caught him, one night, kissing another girl in his car. Since that girl was not his child’s mother, I roughed him up a bit and Mary stabbed a couple of his tires, then we were over.
I knew whatever I had Greg had given me, and after the medicine hadn’t worked, I also knew it wasn’t a UTI or a yeast infection. The doctor couldn’t find out what it was. I couldn’t figure out what it was, but without a name, without a diagnosis it was eating me from the inside out.
Even though consistent, constant pain can sometimes dull, I learned that wouldn’t always happen on its own. Sometimes, the dulling has to be willful, self-imposed. Mine had to be beaten, pressed into nerves that once allowed the touch of breeze, the taste of strawberries, the sound of Marvin Gaye to tease, tempt, and tantalize. So, I willfully bec
ame a dulled, dead, walking thing, a being devoid of pleasure, an oozing wound that chose not to feel itself festering.
Gotta Be My Own Healing
Three months after ending with Greg, my only reminders of the relationship were the burning, itching, and bleeding. I mostly thought of him when the stinging and stabbing shook the mental block I had constructed around the pain. Then I regretted having ever met him, wished that first night in the dumpster had been my lowest, that I had refused to go in the dark hole and had been demoted at that moment. Those times I did think of Greg, I wondered what I’d seen in him, why someone so small in character and stature had grown so big in my eyes.
I wondered this as he walked to my house, three months after we’d ended, pale skin, thinning, brownish-blond-gray hair, stubby legs, and sly grin. “Hey, my pretty young thang,” he slurred. I didn’t offer a faux giggle as I had in the past. I just stared, questioning his presence.
Greg stopped, midstep, obviously taken aback by my lackluster welcome. He pulled at the bottom of his shirt, craned his neck and tried again. “How have you been feeling, Laurie?” This question seemed sincere, less rehearsed, and that angered me even more. Sincere had never been our relationship. Everything about us was rehearsed, one scene after another, written and produced by Greg, acted out by a “minor player,” me.
“I’m good,” I said with heat that contradicted my “good.”
“I got something to tell you,” he stumbled, “to ask you, I mean.” I listened, expecting him to ask me to go out again or to have sex with him. I already knew my answer, but I listened anyway.
“I got something and I think you gave it to me.”
I clasped my hands tightly around each other as I processed his words. He had something and thought I gave it to him. I stopped myself from swearing out loud. I had something too and even though I knew he’d given it to me, I’d never said those words aloud. I’d never allowed myself to think about confronting him. Maybe I was embarrassed for him, for me. Maybe I was afraid revealing his dirt would make me appear dirtier. Whatever it had been, I’d always known he had left something behind, and my silence, out of deference to him, was required.
But on that porch, I didn’t want to be quiet anymore. Not only had he ridiculed me, used me for sex, cheated on me, infected me with some disease, but he had the nerve to want to place the blame on me, to bid me carry more of his dirt even though I had been the one wallowing in it for months. As I prepared to pummel him with my tongue, Greg continued.
“I went to the clinic downtown and they have your name and everything. You just need to go down there and they’ll tell you that you got it. They said its gonorrhea or something like that.”
“Gonorrhea,” I repeated. In the middle of my rage brewing for Greg, an itch, a good one, was growing in me. I felt goose bumps sprouting all over my body. “Gonorrhea” was what I had been suffering for the last four months. I could have hugged Greg, but he was still talking, still asking for more than he’d ever deserved.
“See, you had to have given it to me because I hadn’t been with anybody but you and my daughter’s mother. She said I gave it to her, so I know you had to be the one to give it to me. You think you know who gave it to you?” he asked as if pleading for my “yes.”
Then it all became clear. Greg needed me to say I’d given it to him so he could believe his child’s mother hadn’t. He wanted me to sacrifice myself so she could be his happy. I was in pause, rewinding the last months, seeing snippets that revealed we had been suffering the same hunger, had been starved in the same way, yet we could not feed each other. But, here, I could give him a gift that had never been given to me. I could be his lie, so he could continue living the one he had constructed around his relationship.
Greg’s sly grin became a pleading frown, one degree less than a scowl. With eyes looking down, hands in pocket, he kicked at imaginary rocks. He asked again, “So, how have you been feeling?”
Same question, new meaning. To say “I was sick” would corroborate his lie. To say “I was well” would be me spinning a lie of my own. So, I had to decide, Greg’s lie or mine.
Without flicking neck, smacking teeth, or rolling eyes, I said, “I’m sorry Greg. I’ve been fine. Just had a doctor’s appointment and I don’t have anything.” His shoulders slumped, as his heavy boot lay flat against my dirt yard. The porch banister separated us and yet I had the urge to hold him, to comfort him as I witnessed his reality shattering against the hammer of my own. Part of me wanted to give him what he wanted. I felt a strong need to shoulder the blame, so he wouldn’t have to eat the sourness of his child’s mother, his happy, being untrue. But the need to save him quickly passed when I felt a new itch, an old one, but new because I had suppressed it for so long. I remembered the bleeding, the burning, the itching, and how no one, especially not Greg, had helped me. He had infected me with a disease; I would not allow him to infect me with the guilt of his and his girlfriend’s infidelity. I had enough of my own guilt to carry.
“Greg, you’re going to have to talk to your girlfriend again,” was all I could say.
“Well, here’s the doctor’s name at the clinic and here’s the clinic’s address. Maybe you don’t know you have it. The doctors say you can have this disease and not know.”
“I know I didn’t give that to you, Greg,” I said as I examined the card. “I’m just sorry you don’t.” He looked up when I said that, defeated. The whites of his eyes were redder than I remembered and wrinkles formed lines around his mouth, his cheeks. They connected with the ones around his eyes. He looked so old, tired, scared. How had I ever thought he could save me?
“Can you at least call me after you see the doctor? My number’s the same,” Greg said.
“Yeah, but can you write your number down? I don’t remember it.”
He looked disappointed as he pulled out a pen from his pocket and wrote his number on the back of the card. It was probably the same pen he’d used when he wrote my name and number that first day. No twinge of jealousy escaped me or made me think, I have to make him choose me. I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted him to leave so I could celebrate my future healing.
I would go to the doctor the next day. The doctor would tell me if Greg had gonorrhea, then I probably had it, so he’d treat me in lieu of the results. He would give me two shots in my butt and I would cry in relief, already feeling the healing coursing through my body. But that was the next day’s business.
That night, after Greg left, I lay in bed, allowing myself to feel every pang of burning, every itch resembling a cluster of mosquito bites, every bee sting lump against flesh. My body twisted in pain, as I screamed into the pillow, beat hands against the mattress, kicked feet against cinderblock walls.
For the last few months, I had been paralyzed, so I began willing every nerve in my body to awaken from a too-long slumber. In between each stab and spasm there was peace. I heard leaves high-fiving outside my window. I felt summer’s heat crowding the window’s screen, carrying the fragrance of beach, cookouts, and lemon floating in iced tea. The unmute button having been pressed, I heard myself, a song, again. I ushered all those feelings, the good and the bad, into me because living required it and I was ready to scab over and mend.
Pretty as Pat
After Sanford and Greg, there were others found and lost, as I searched for something or someone to save me. I’d grown accustomed to the dysfunction of Lincoln Park. I no longer felt anger toward Momma when she chose Mr. Bryan again and again. Sanford had all but faded into my past. I’d resolved myself to entering the Army once I graduated. Still, I believed there had to be something better, someone better who could guarantee my life would not be as it had always been: one of starvation, one of waiting.
I believed I’d found my savior once I met Pat, Pretty Pat as most of Lincoln Park referred to him. We met the afternoon after Wilson High’s awards day. Momma had let me wear one of her prettiest dresses, a royal blue, double-breasted one that rounded out my
body in all the right places. Gold buttons the size of silver dollars meandered across the front in rows of three, and the V-neck showed just a hint of cleavage. The hem stopped above my knees, highlighting what Momma said was one of my best assets, my curvy legs. It fit like a winding sheet, bullying imperfections into shape. I morphed into Momma as I wore her dress, hair blowing in the wind, brown skin glistening under the sun’s kiss. I felt beautiful like Momma, so I twisted harder, walked longer, and smiled as the alley leading to my home turned into a runway.
While with Sanford, I barely passed most of my classes and ended my junior year with a 1.7 G.P.A. Once we were no more, I devoured my teachers’ lessons, went to class, listened attentively, and began to think of myself as more than a punching bag or something to sex. I learned I was actually smart and not Greg’s smart because he was teaching me, but my smart, owning a knowledge that had always been in me, a knowledge that had nothing to do with being someone’s woman.
During the awards ceremony, the principal presented several certificates to me—straight A’s throughout the year, highest G.P.A. in Spanish, getting second place in a poetry contest, and making honor roll every marking period—but none of those honors meant as much as Pretty Pat following me with his eyes as I exited the bus.
Pat sat on the brown, wooden fence parallel to my house, as he’d often done since the Cavalier Manor boys infiltrated Lincoln Park. He wore a white T-shirt that framed his muscular chest and jean shorts that exposed his bulging calf muscles. His skin was cappuccino-colored, free from dark spots or lines, so perfect it looked like liquid had been poured into a glass statue.
After he appeared in Lincoln Park, many girls, myself included, watched him, studied the way he walked: with wide gait, straight back, and a buoyancy that made it look as if the ground had gone soft just for him. He had brown, full lips, eyes more caramel than my own, and thick wavy hair that framed his chiseled face. He moved effortlessly through the dusty and dark Lincoln Park; where he went, my eyes followed. Mary and I sometimes sat in our bedroom window, chins resting on folded hands, eyes locked on his movements. We discussed for hours how a man could be so beautiful and still be a man.
Crave Page 31