When She Was Good

by Tristan Taormino

  THE STORM CHASERS

  Peggy Munson

  Rumspringa

  I’ve thought about kissing a girl for a while, but I don’t expect it to happen here.

  The Amish kids go bowling at this place in Pennsylvania, where Ohio stands yawning at its border. A girl is smoking cigarettes outside like she hates everything. Her hair is in braids that she has twisted up into odd coils against her head. She stares at the balcony of clouds that watches a flat horizon dreaming of steel. I can tell she’s one of the Amish kids on Rumspringa, partying like it’s 1999. Rumspringa (“running around”) is the window of time when they can break the Amish rules before deciding if they want to get baptized.

  She sits there like an old house equalizing pressure after a draft blows in. I’m just sucked in her direction, and she looks like she’s used to it. I plop next to her on the concrete stoop and she doesn’t glance my way. “Yeah, I’m Amish, so what’s your second question?” she says before I speak. It should be mentioned that I hate my new haircut and I tried to fix it earlier but ended up chopping off another three inches and now it’s as rancid as a wet dog limping hopelessly through the world’s unbalance. So I’ve got my hood up on my black hoodie and these fucked-up bits of hair peeking out. All I do at home is prune myself and masturbate.

  “Sorry to hear that,” I finally mutter, not knowing what else to say.

  “You’re sorry?” she says with hostility. “You’re the one living the Apocalypse, English.” She stubs out her cigarette on the ground and now it’s dark, Midwest-dark, the kind of dark with coal dust in it. She is pretty—maybe sixteen with yeast-risen cheeks. Still, about the same age as me so I don’t know why I’m talking about her like we’re different. A car’s headlights do a swoop around as someone parks and that’s when I see the etchings on her inner forearm: unmistakable cut marks all up and down. “Oh my god,” I say, grabbing her wrist, which she quickly yanks away. “What the fuck?” she exclaims. “That’s fucking rude.” She starts to throw shit in her bag to wobble upright. I feel a jolt through my cunt from touching her.

  “I didn’t mean to freak you out. I—” I say, my hand reaching up, and then my hood falls back and she notices my hair and starts to laugh at me. Her laugh grows into a plume of smoke, and then she’s coughing on her own laugh.

  “I’m just uneven,” I say defensively.

  “That’s for sure,” she replies. Her lips are some kind of bad candy, something laced with something illegal and maybe even deadly. Probably Ecstasy.

  There’s a spasm of air between us, traveling up my legs. Then she casts me this look that is pure sex, so unexpected it makes me blush.

  Some guy named Jacob drove her here in a borrowed car. And I’ve got a boy inside the bowling alley, a friend named David who wants to be more. Now that this girl and I have an animal look between us we know (just know) that we have to make out with the boys to overcompensate for the way the world is gathering into a funnel cloud to spill us on the ground and the horses are undoing earth with their hooves. We end up on the edge of this field that is so lonely it keeps trying to hoard the moonlight, and the boys have beer. Everyone loves a drunk Amish girl on Rumspringa so the boys make sure she gets the first bottle and I find out her name is Ellie.

  Later I am dizzy and have lost sight of her and David pushes his hands up my shirt. His fingers on my breasts do a drowsy massage. He kisses my neck. He pushes me backward and I’m initially relieved to be lying down but then I feel his hard-on in his pants. “Jesus, David,” I say to him. I need air. I say it over and over like a halftime cheer. “Air air air air air.” It’s one of those moments of pep rally incongruity I’ve felt before when I can’t seem to smile for the same reasons as everyone else.

  “What’d you do to your hair?” David asks. He looks elated to have kissed me. He has a dopey smile on his pimple-ridged face. “No, it looks good,” he adds, and he means it.

  There’s something ominous in the orchestral score of crickets and that unspeakable dark motor within boys of a certain age. Sometimes the only way out is through. I keep looking around for her and we kiss and he presses his bulge against my leg. I don’t let him fuck me though.

  The voice across the field is reciting something from a German opera. “And the English are all dead!” he exclaims at the end. It’s her boy, Jacob, and he has her by the wrist. They drag across the field in our direction and she looks ill. The clouds have all been shredded into little pieces and they are nuzzling against stars. Everything is above us pressing down. I tell the boys to go get more beer so they’ll leave us alone.

  “How can we do that?” Jacob asks. He’s already drunk with anger in the corners of his eyes.

  “That gas station,” I retort. “We passed it up the road.”

  “Will you be okay?” David asks me, like he’s my boyfriend or like he cares. They know that getting beer is boys’ work, and that’s the only good thing about them.

  We have maybe forty minutes, and she tells me that her mouth tastes like him and she needs a goddamn cigarette. She keeps saying it but she can’t find her pack of Camels. “A goddamn cigarette,” she repeats. It takes me a while to figure out she sucked his dick and I’m about to ask her if she liked it when her eyes get all saturnine and ringed and she stops my question dead. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says.

  “Did he make you?” I ask, but I am positive he did.

  “I just want this fucking taste out of my mouth,” is all she says. Finally, somewhere deep in my pocket, I find a wadded piece of wrapper that contains one breath mint, and that one mint cools down the core temperature of the night. “Thank god,” she says, rubbing her fingers unconsciously on the marks on her forearm. “That’s better.”

  There is a thick choking shame wending its way from the water table below this field. It’s just like any other place around here, strewn with litter from kids who got drunk and pretended to strangle cornstalks with their fists. Her breath comes out in accelerating minty puffs and then, suddenly, she puts the tip of her sneaker over mine, rubbing the rubber together. Burn, I think. Burn rubber. I’m thinking about masturbating in my bedroom with the plastic handle of this big pink makeup brush I fuck myself with, listening to albums she has never heard: I want to bring her into my world. But we just stay there, poured into molds of ourselves hardening, our breathing startled by its perpetuity.

  “I can’t fool around with you,” she says finally. “It’s too finite.” But for the first time in my life, I feel like I could go on forever. I know she feels it too, the infinity braiding its way between us.

  She is the one starting it with her hand on my knee, with pent-up pride like the bow of an iron, smoothing me down in front of her.

  She rubs her hand down the outside of my jeans to the crease where my thigh meets my bush, and she just holds it there. She just presses the edge of it down, karate-chop-like, into that bit of human give. It is one pinhead of nothing that is everything, all angels. There’s a pulsation—some rocket between the edge of her hand and my hole. To the whole of me. It’s an incredible rush.

  I reach for her chicken-scratched arm. That arm is like a foreign language, an unbound scroll.

  She tries to pull away but I am surprisingly rough and say, “Don’t.” I kick up from the bottom of some murk, trying to get air. Air. I hold down her thighs with both palms and look at her. She takes my face in her hands and kisses me all over my cheeks and lips so perfectly. I smooth her shifting hairs back from her eyes and she keeps diving further into me, whimpering. Then our hands are grappling for everything as quickly as possible: inner thighs, breasts, ass. I feel it everywhere, fast and spreading out: heat lightning. We only have a few more minutes before the glare of headlights, and that’s when I do it, slide my hand past her waistband to stroke her wet hole. “Oh god,” I say. “You feel so amazing, Ellie.” We pull away when we see the boys. Soon enough the angry boy is throwing bottles on the ground trying to smash them. “It’s a christening,” he say
s drunkenly. “A christening.”

  On the drive home with drunk Jacob at the wheel I think tonight is the night we are probably dying in a DUI. Ellie and I sit together in the backseat and her knee knocks against mine and she steals slight touches on my arm when she can. Because David on my other side is so drunk anyway, she takes a moment to nuzzle against my neck and rub her lips on my ear and whisper, “I want you.” I know we are never going to kiss again. Never: that cataclysm.

  Never never in the timber framing.

  Never never and we are probably dying.

  But no: drunks spill back into the slurred world. Ellie and I look longingly at each other—the restless dead. We’re in the parking lot: David returned to his abandoned car. We stop to watch Jacob kiss her: it’s torture. “She’s minty fresh,” Jacob says to my face, and he steers her shoulders toward the car. She makes a tipsy trip, and he loses his hold, so I lunge and grab her arm.

  “Whoa,” she giggles. Her eyes go from lamplight to electricity, and we carelessly lean into a drunken kiss, and I feel the slick danger between my legs. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” David snarls abrasively. “Are you asking for Meidung you crazy bitch?” I feel the eggshell air. I know the boys will come after us with timbers, with brush and switch. But this is how adults choose their baptisms. “I’m running around,” she hisses. “Get used to it.”

  Electricity

  She needs me: she needs electricity. If I could pedal fast enough, I would generate enough of it. At the dinky cemetery past her house, I cram my hand down my pants and rub my clit and think about her varnished eyes. I remove the plastic makeup brush from my bag and slide it into my hole, moaning quietly. I think about her careful quilting hands on every stitch of me. I want to undress her: how many layers? What made me fall for Ellie wasn’t just how slick and wet my cunt was when I went to pee after she kissed me that night, how many wads of tissue it took to wipe her off of me, but those violently etched arms. I want to make her feel something worth the shunning of life in those razor cuts.

  I stick a note in the post at the edge of the farm. Please, Ellie, let me touch you, it says.

  She finally writes back that she has been “bundling” with Jacob: it’s a Rumspringa tradition where a teenage boy sleeps in a girl’s bed and they are encouraged to talk, fondle and grope. They’re not supposed to fuck, but the Amish are pragmatists, and sometimes girls get pregnant. “It’s awful,” she writes. “He keeps making me feel his dick. I just want to have an orgasm.” Her nerve endings are too overshot for her to cum by her own hand. “I mean with you,” she adds. “An orgasm with you.” She needs electricity.

  So I go stealthily into Target and buy a plug-in “massager” to make her cum. I want to stroke her skin in the milkweed-tossed air. Everyone can do the other thing: go into raw mercy. Everyone can scrape with fingernails the inside of the oyster shell. It’s only rare, repressed, broken people who can coax an elusive sensation from someone as fucked up as Ellie and I. I practice when I’m home alone: the massager and the makeup brush and David Bowie and that exquisite bowed time before my body explodes. I think of white bonnets.

  We bundle in a fleabag motel, beneath two scratchy blankets. “You look pretty,” I say, giving her a pack of Camels. I’m high on the scent of her hair: simple and buttery with a hint of burned kerosene. Her hand kneads my leg and then something desperate and thundering takes over us, and as soon as I put her smoke in an ashtray we are tumbling under the blanket, kissing and trying to get our hands to each other’s tits. She changed into street clothes before meeting me but underneath are cotton wares: a sweet undershirt and plain panties. As soon as I touch her nipple over her shirt, giving it a squeeze, I know exactly where the technological world went wrong, putting wires between sensualists.

  “I’m freaked out,” she says suddenly. “Will you burn me?” I pull back, but my fingers keep exploring her tits.

  “No way, Ellie. I can’t.” I’m confused by the request. “You mean with a cigarette?”

  “I’ll feel calmer.” She reaches for the ashtray.

  I’m skeptical. “Where?” She has marks all over her.

  She pulls up her undershirt, then she points to three spots from her navel to her clit. “Make buttons,” she says. The Amish can’t have buttons, or other markers of vanity.

  She covers her face a little while I make buttons of singed skin. I focus completely, and she digs her hands into my scalp and pulls at my hair. Each time she moans, I get a deep throb in my cunt. I like burning her with the cigarette. When I’m done, she has three button-burns trailing to her bush. “Fuck, Ellie, I want to make you cum,” I say, grabbing her scarred wrists. “Show me,” she says. I nudge her shirt with my nose and take the pearly button of her nipple in my mouth, then kiss down the button trail, bite and pull at her underwear, and finally put my mouth on her sweet juices while her head thrashes a little on the pillow and then she holds my skull in place. Down on her.

  “Check out the electric sorcerer,” I say, holding the vibrator like a sword after I plug it in. I lift her head up a little with my hand and kiss her cheeks and lips while I press the vibrations on her clit, tease her hole, smell the sweet rising of the lazy minutes before her noises get loud and she grabs on to me, screaming “Oh fuck” and jerking and shaking and curling her limbs. Right as she cums I stick two fingers inside of her so I can feel her hole pulse against me.

  “It’s just a little lightning and a key,” I say. “Electricity.”

  “It’s definitely you and me,” she replies. “Not a key.”

  Bolt

  “The night falls like a bolt of cloth. Look at it—it makes a velvet thud upon the plain,” says Ellie. I wrap my hands around her and kiss her: she always feels like velvet to me. We have scraped together just enough money to live. Ellie still has a month or two before she has to tell the Amish if she’s coming back.

  Ellie presses her ear to the tracks and then hobbles over on her knees and presses her other ear against my belly stud. “It could be the Lake Shore Limited,” she says, then reaches around and cups her hands on my ass, kissing the skin above my belt buckle. She shoves me back against a tree by the time the train rolls by, clanging and blowing its horn. She fucks me with her knuckles sliding in and out while I feel the vibrations of the train in my body. She whispers, “Open up, English,” and holds the smoothness of my back like I’m a flattened penny.

  We hang out at the train yard at night. It is splintered from the town—with old, sturdy containers of runaway echoes. Without fatty Amish food, Ellie has a body like a tent post and her hair falls around her in a stilled centrifugal swing ride. She perches on the rails like a bird of prey and waits for the night to produce a scared animal.

  The train yard is where our new friend Spade sleeps in a dirty Lands End sleeping bag in a boxcar. Spade is a gender-queer boi who left the Amish after hallucinogens twisted his head around. He and Ellie speak the same Pennsylvania Dutch and she calls him Bu for boy. He makes drawings with colored pencils and tacks them to utility poles at night. His drawings appear to be from a tortured, maniacal child in art therapy: red with the brutality of flat figurines. He often tells us he can’t wait to bolt from this town, but he knows he’s too crazy to ride the rails. He tells Ellie and me to join him on the other side of this Grimm fairy tale.

  “Don’t be silly,” says Ellie. “You’re the story, Spade. We’re your bookends.”

  We leave for work in the tie-dyed light, and put on white aprons with scalloped edges. Ellie fills the coffee machine and I screw lids off the salt. She has slight curves that remind men of highways, so we make good tips but not enough. This is a sleepy town of horny, frustrated men who walk around with coffee steam crimping bowed beards. Sometimes guys give us a few bucks to watch us kiss on our breaks. Ellie’s lips are terse, friendly postcards then. She holds my shoulder blades like they’re decorative plates. In our apartment, Ellie eats like a bear with a honey jar. She likes foods she can scoop out—kiwifru
its cut in half, hard-boiled eggs she hollows out of their shells, peanut butter she eats from the jar. Ellie marvels at the simplest things about living independently. We give Spade change for the truck stop showers and take him clothes we pick up at the secondhand shop and keep him groomed, like a pet. He’s the second boi we have ever met.

  “Take my order, miss,” Ellie commands me, flopping me down on the bed, biting my nipples through my shirt. She pulls my polyester uniform off, wrapping the apron strings around my wrists. She grabs my panties with her teeth. She runs her tongue between my pussy lips like she is scooping the flavor out. She stops right as I’m about to cum. “Wait, my English Breakfast,” she says. “I have to check out your bum.”

  She grabs the paddle we got at an antique store where the woman said “corporeal” and “punishment” so many times I had to fuck Ellie on the way home. It’s an old schoolhouse paddle. Ellie gives me a few whaps on the ass. She wants to make sure that today is forgotten and tomorrow’s dress digressed. I chew the edge of the sheet to blot my sounds until she makes me cum.

  Then I flip her over. Sometimes she looks like a drowned thing, so kittenish and waiting for resurrection. Because she has not decided about baptism, they have not shunned her: she meets them and their sad beards as the elders try to talk her back home. When I slide my fingers into her and run my tongue over her clit and make her moan, I feel like I am chasing a storm.

  Spade—who reads voraciously—talks about Allen Ginsberg. “The girl Beats got so shafted,” I reply, and then realize Ellie has no idea what we’re talking about with her eighth-grade education. We melt chocolate in a can and dip leftover diner flapjacks in. Ellie teases my hem, rippling the edge of it up and down and brushing her nails against my skin until Spade looks blue-balled. I love the telekinetic energy of one thing influencing another thing.

  “I really need to get a cock. I’m a war amp,” Spade laments, looking at the denim folds of his crotch. He’s drinking the last slurps from a bottle of Jack Daniels. We’ve been working extra when we can, saving up to buy the Click Dick for Spade. The Click Dick comes with this casting material dentists use. You wrap it around a man’s dick and make an imprint, and then send it to the company to fill with silicone. We want to surprise Spade for his birthday with a realistic-looking, custom cock. We’ve been looking for a man to meet our size credentials, and we think we’ve spotted him—the Wooly Mammoth. The Wooly Mammoth is as hairy as a clogged drain, with a bulge as big as a burial mound: a real flannel man.