Hello Groin

by Beth Goobie

  “Forget it,” Joc grunted sleepily.

  “No heaven for you then,” I said. “Let’s see, the next sin listed is purloining offerings.”

  “Does that have something to do with loins?” asked Joc, waking up slightly.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “It’s stealing. They’re really big on stealing in this list.”

  “Oh,” mumbled Joc. For a moment she lay quietly, her eyes still closed, then said, “So far I have three negative confessions I can make—no murder, no stealing grain, and no purloining loins. Oops, I mean offerings.” She smiled contentedly.

  “Ah, but you have to say it correctly,” I said. “‘Hail, Ruruti, who comest forth from—’”

  “Shut up,” Joc said.

  I did shut up, just to bug her, and pretended to read silently. After a bit her toe nudged my foot and she asked, “What’s the next sin?”

  “More stealing,” I said. “This time it’s the property of God.”

  “Haven’t done that either,” she murmured.

  “Ah,” I said, “but you’re screwed on the next few.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked, opening one eye. “What are they?”

  “Lying,” I said, “carrying away food and cursing.”

  “Cursing’s not a sin,” said Joc. “It’s a natural instinct. Lying’s just a different way of looking at something. That can be very good for your mind. And everyone’s carried food. How else do you get something out of the fridge?”

  “Okey-dokey,” I said. “Next sin: adultery.”

  “Nope, no adultery,” said Joc.

  “Ah, but it goes on,” I said. “It says here: ‘I have not lain with men.’”

  “Oops,” said Joc. “No heaven for me. No Egyptian heaven.” She sniggered.

  “Except,” I said, my mouth leaping ahead of my mind, “I think this list is for a man, so if this sin was written for a woman, it would say, ‘I have not lain with women.’”

  As I said this, Joc’s one open eye widened, and an excruciating jolt of electricity leapt between us. Then her eye closed and she lay motionless, without speaking. In the sudden silence I felt raw, charred to the bone, as if someone had zapped me with a flamethrower.

  “The next sin,” I stammered, dragging words, any words, into the jagged air, “is ‘I have made none to weep.’ And the next—”

  Stunned, I halted, reading and rereading the phrase.

  “What?” asked Joc, her eyes still closed, her lips barely moving.

  “‘Hail Basti,’” I said softly, “‘who comest forth from Bast, I have not eaten the heart.’”

  Joc lay absolutely still, as if absorbing the words through her skin. “I have not eaten my heart?” she repeated.

  “Pretty much,” I whispered.

  Her eye came open and she nailed me with it. “No heaven for you then, eh Dyllie?” she said quietly, and closed it again.

  Chapter Six

  So that was the way it was between us—known but indirectly, a kind of hidden story always going on beneath the surface. For the most part, I did my best to ignore it. But the problem was that it wouldn’t stay ignored. I mean, I’m talking about a basic body function here. No matter how much you try to ignore something like that, no matter how much you tell yourself that your body is just a subplot in your life, it isn’t. It’s the main plot. Which is kind of weird, considering that the average teenager is surrounded by people telling her it’s her mind that’s most important, her school grades, and her future. I’m not saying these aren’t important—they are. But the body is the main plot. That’s where you live the story of your life, that’s where you are.

  And if you try to ignore all of this—I mean your body and what it’s trying to tell you, well, things get twisted. Because the main plot never likes to be shoved down under a bunch of sub-plots. So while you’re up in your head, pretending your body has everything wrong, it’s looking for a way to prove to you that it’s got it all right. And believe me, the body is devious. It’ll take any opportunity that comes along, anything—even something as mundane as a class discussion about an assigned reading—to make its point.

  The mundane class discussion that I’m referring to took place two days after Dikker’s first drama rehearsal. For the past week, my English class had been reading the novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang by Joyce Carol Oates. In a nutshell, the book is about five high school girls in the 1950s who formed a gang called Foxfire. Though Foxfire was exclusively made up of girls, it was tough, taking on the guy gangs in the area, even stealing a car at one point. But most of their activities were more along the lines of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to help the poor. Even so, their leader, Legs Sadovsky, landed in jail for a while, but when she got out, the gang rented a house in the country and continued their Robin Hood activities, hanging around hotel lobbies and bus stations, pretending to be sweet and naive, then taking the married men who hit on them for everything they were worth. A twisted sense of justice maybe, and in the end they went too far, kidnapping a guy and holding him for ransom. Then a new girl, who had just joined Foxfire, shot the hostage, and the gang had to split up to escape the police.

  In an attempt to kick-start a discussion about the novel, our teacher, Mr. Cronk, asked the class whether we thought justice was a universal or personal principle, and what the difference between the two was. As on most days when he tried to get us talking, the majority of kids continued to sit sprawled in their desks, eyes dull and heavy-lidded as they worked on their non-response skills. Like the others I was in shut-down mode, slouched in my usual position in the back row beside Joc, who was slouched in the next desk. Just looking at me, no one would have guessed I was actually listening as the front-row keeners gave the expected responses: one—justice by definition is universal, and two—everything is subjective, even God, so how can justice be universal?

  We were supposed to have read to part four of the novel, but the lack of response made it obvious most of the class hadn’t cracked the cover. Still Mr. Cronk kept at us, his eyes skipping the front row and focusing in on us back-row slackers. And damn it all if it didn’t feel as if he had his eyes specifically peeled for me, as if he’d somehow tuned to the fact that for once Dylan Kowolski, back-row dreamer extraordinaire, had managed to complete an assignment ahead of schedule. Because it just so happened that I’d finished Foxfire last night, had actually read the entire novel in one sitting, tearing through it with my heart in my mouth and feeling each scene as if it was happening inside my body—the gang’s initiation of bloody tattoos and bared breasts, the attack as they’d come crashing through the office window onto Uncle Wimpy, their crazed flight in Acey Holman’s Buick DeLuxe, and Legs Sadovsky trapped in the Red Bank State Correctional Facility for Girls, watching eleven sparrow hawks through the small high window in The Room. Even now as I sat slouched at the back of English 11, watching the rest of the class slouched in their desks ahead of me, I could feel Legs standing in the schoolyard, knife in hand as she faced down a gang of boys and shouted, Fuck off!

  And in that moment, as Mr. Cronk tried once again, prodding the class for a response, any response, a simple goddamn sign of intelligence in the universe, it connected with me—the meaning of the apathy Legs had been fighting, the enormity of it, the absolute weight.

  Without warning a voice started coming out of my mouth— an unfamiliar, raw, gravelly sounding voice. And to my astonishment it said, “Justice is like sex, really. There are rules for when and how and what you can do, categories you fit into depending on how far you’ll go, and how often and with who. And it’s only when you buck the system and break the rules that you find out what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

  All across the room, dull slouched bodies were coming awake. Straightening in their seats, kids turned to give me dubious looks.

  “Find out about what?” asked a guy in the far right corner. “Justice or sex?”

  “Um,” said one of the front-row keeners, “I don’t really think this book is abou
t that.”

  “About what?” asked Mr. Cronk quickly.

  “Well,” hesitated the girl in the front row, “sex. I mean, you asked us about justice...”

  “Of course, it’s about sex,” said the gravelly voice coming out of my mouth. Once again it had managed to bypass the thinking, reasoning, sane part of my brain, and cut loose with my secret thoughts. “Everything we do in life is sex, isn’t it?” the voice continued, while I sat there hardly able to believe what it was saying. “I mean, it all comes from the same place inside you, doesn’t it? And that place is either a place of following rules and doing what you’re told, or figuring things out for yourself. Besides, Foxfire was an all-girl gang. Their justice was completely about sex. It was sex for them. Or maybe a replacement for it.”

  “You mean if they were getting laid properly, they wouldn’t have been doing the gang thing?” asked the guy in the far right corner.

  “Properly?” I shot back, too quickly to think about what I was saying first. “You mean with a guy, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” shrugged the guy.

  “Dyke city,” muttered the girl sitting in the desk ahead of me.

  Bye bye, sane reasoning brain. Suddenly I was leaning forward in my seat, my blood pounding furiously. Like I said, the body is devious.

  “That means you’re thinking universal, doesn’t it?” I blurted to the guy in the far right corner. “As in mainstream, what everyone else around you is doing? But I don’t think that just because Foxfire was a girls’ gang, they had to be dykes. I mean, maybe they were and maybe they weren’t, but what matters is that they were a group of girls who decided to think for themselves. Because isn’t that the way you really learn—about sex, love, justice, reality, anything? I mean, how can you figure out the universal meaning of something if you don’t work out the personal meaning for yourself first?”

  “But you can’t have people running around kidnaping and shooting each other,” objected a girl near the front of the room. “You need universal things like rules and laws. And you should obey them. They’re there to protect you.”

  “Sure they are,” interrupted a guy halfway down the window aisle. “But Dylan’s right too. If you don’t work things out for yourself, you’re a robot.”

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding emphatically. I mean, I was so pumped, I was almost levitating. “I’m not saying you should break every rule,” I added, trying to backtrack a bit. I didn’t want Mr. Cronk thinking I was about to start a terrorist cell or something. “But if you live inside a rule, or a law, or whatever, all the time, without ever thinking about it, then you are that rule. Nothing but.”

  “Hey Dyl, what’re you doing Friday night?” asked the guy in the far right corner, and a wave of laughter engulfed the class. For a second I stiffened, feeling it all being swept away—the raw, half-baked things I’d been saying and the pure uncoiled sensation of strength that had come with them. But then I relaxed and laughed along with everyone else. So what if we were back to mainstream universal thinking? I’d been able to say what I really thought, something weird and out of sync, and the class hadn’t written me off as a freak. Mr. Cronk was even giving me one of his specialty piercing looks, as if he’d just discovered the next Margaret Atwood. Sure, the only reason I was getting away with it was because I was Cam’s girlfriend, and nobody would suspect, but—

  Mid-thought I glanced at Joc, and my brain ground to an abrupt halt. Because out of the entire class, she was probably the only person not laughing. In fact there wasn’t even the hint of a grin on her face. Leaned against the wall with both eyes closed, she was frozen into such a careful hyper-alert slouch that she looked as if she hadn’t breathed since my first comment.

  “Hey,” I hissed. “We’re talking about sex here. I can’t believe you haven’t said anything.”

  She swallowed, the naked line of her throat rippling, then settling. “Dikker’s been over a lot lately,” she mumbled, without looking at me. “I haven’t started the book yet.”

  Then the bell rang and she opened her eyes as if coming out of a long uninterrupted dream. Gathering her lean sprawled body, she unleashed it from the desk, got to her feet and sauntered out of the room without a backward glance.

  That evening I lay in bed, thinking back to the class discussion and going over it word by word. The experience had been a rush, almost like a drug, but better. Sure, uncertainty had come crashing down on me as soon as I’d walked out of the classroom, but that was to be expected. I mean, there was the question of what Cam was going to think when he heard about it. Then there were his guy friends and the phone patrol. Even now, hours later, when I tried to imagine their responses, a vivid electric worm started crawling around my gut.

  But then I remembered that voice coming out of me, so raw and determined. Of course, it’s about sex, I heard it saying again. Everything we do in life is sex, really. I mean, it all comes from the same place inside you, doesn’t it? And that place is either a place of following rules and doing what you’re told, or figuring things out for yourself.

  I still couldn’t believe I’d actually said those things. How had I gotten away with it? I mean, no one had called me a dyke in the hall afterward, even as a joke. But then probably no one had wanted to take a chance on facing Cam’s wrath. He was my insurance, my disguise. And what would he have thought of the strange gravelly voice that had come out of me? Not much, was my guess. It wouldn’t have fit the queen image he had of me, sitting quiet and pretty on a throne somewhere inside his head. But that wasn’t me, it wasn’t. I just hadn’t figured out the best way to let him in on the secret yet.

  Rolling onto my back, I loosened the tie on my pajama bottoms and slid my hand between my legs. As usual, the first thought that hit me as I started to do this was, Yuck! I mean, when you think about it, the groin is a really grotty area of the body. The smell is enough to put anyone off, there is rank stuff coming out of it on a regular basis, and if you’re female, you also get to do the bleeding thing once a month. I don’t know who was in charge of designing the original female body, but if it had been me, I would not have put the major pleasure center right next to the waste ejection sites. I mean, NOT!

  Waves of sweetness started spreading slowly through my body, and I thought, If only Cam could see me now, feel what I’m feeling. This was what he wanted after all, dreamed about—me feeling this with him. A grin crossed my face as I realized that he was probably lying in his own bed right now, doing pretty much the same thing. But then my grin faded. Because I knew what he would be thinking about—me. And the truth was that I couldn’t say I was thinking about him. Not if I was honest.

  Usually when I did this kind of thing, I made myself think about Cam for as long as possible. Closing my eyes, I would imagine us sitting in his car and kissing, but the truth was that the hotter my body got, the quicker Cam faded from my thoughts. Not once had I made myself come while thinking about him, and the images that kept flashing through my head tonight were straight out of Foxfire, specifically the gang’s initiation scene, where the girls take off their shirts and crowd in against each other. Though I pushed it out of my mind, the scene kept coming back to me—all that skin, heat and fierce nervous laughter...the forbiddenness of it. Because, of course, girls aren’t supposed to think about breasts, at least not another girl’s breasts.

  With a groan, I once again pushed the scene out of my mind and made myself think about Cam. And just like that I lost it—the body sensation, heat and sweetness. It all vanished and the whole thing became mechanical, as if I’d lost the me of it, the soul.

  Suddenly I thought, Why am I stopping myself? I mean, it’s just pictures in my head. It’s not like I’m actually two-timing.

  And so for the first time I actually let myself do it—let go of the rule, the law of Cam. With another groan, I stopped fighting the pictures in my head and let them happen any way they wanted. Immediately I felt myself flat up against it, the raw pleading need of myself. I’d never felt
it this way before—brilliant, as if I’d been skinned alive, some rubbery surface peeled off me so I’d become complete sensation. And then, without warning, Joc was there with me in my mind, leaning over me, her hair in a long coconut-scented fall about my face. And we were kissing, kissing again, the soft drift of our lips sending an incredible sweetness everywhere through me. I cried out then, almost shouted at the fierce wave of longing that swept through me—I hadn’t known it could be like this, so intense, such a deep opening within myself. Lying on my bed with the imaginary Joc leaned over me, I came again and again, the sweetness like an ocean crashing over me, like a scream, a crime.

  Finally, finally, it faded, leaving me soaked with sweat, my bed sheets stuck to my skin. But my body was at peace, floating on a vast calm, without the usual lines of edginess that ran through it. Soaked and smelly in the dark, I lay quietly with a goofy grin plastered across my face. No wonder Cam wanted to give this to me, I thought. No wonder he kept after me, begging and pleading with me to try it. And the real wonder of it all was that he was actually holding himself back and waiting for me. I mean, I knew he wasn’t doing it with another girl on the sly—he really was waiting for me.

  So what was I supposed to do now? Because if I’d needed final proof that this kind of sensation, this way of being together, would never happen between us, I’d just gotten it. For the first time I’d asked my body to tell me what it knew, to show me completely and absolutely who I was in that deep raw core where everything comes from—that place without rules. And it had. Sweetly. Explosively. Conclusively.

  Should I phone Cam and tell him the truth? Break up with him without explaining? Or just let things continue as they were, while I explored this newness inside me and tried to figure out what it meant?

  Nothing had to be done immediately, I decided finally. No one seemed to have figured out what was really going on with me, so why not let things continue as they were for a while longer? After all, it wasn’t as if anyone was begging me to change.