I spent the rest of summer splayed out on my bed, contemplating the sky through the blinds, analyzing every song lyric I could make out on the radio, interpreting every night’s hours-long phone call with Jeff in myriad ways, and waiting for Abigail, who was finally back from visiting her family in Germany, to knock on my window so I could sprint down the hall to the living room and open the front door for her. One night I was listening to a station that Jeff turned me onto. I was immediately suspicious of the jazz fusion sound and eager to tear it apart because it sounded like elevator music and didn’t have voices. But I listened, interested because Jeff was interested. A song finished, one featuring a melancholy piano that made me think of him, and how he’d written songs for piano for his girlfriend.
Sniffing the air absently, I tried to locate the scent he had remarked upon, stunning me with his attention to nuance. He told me that everyone has their own unique scent, and that mine gave him “olfactory orgasms.” My legs splayed out, I inhaled and caught a hint of iron, reminding me I needed to change my pad. The blood was welcome this time, for the first time. I pressed my legs together and absently reminded myself to pay close attention to other people’s scents, their olfactory imprint, but all I could imagine was the scent of Ralph Lauren Polo on a wooly sweater.
I sat on my bed, still, yet electric, thinking I was in love, staring at the tops of the tree branches that wound their way from the backyard and touched my long, rectangular window.
The sky, I thought, preparing to find a pen and paper, is a rich hue of violet-blue-gorgeous. The pine needles wavered in the slight wind of the summer night.
I sat and concentrated hard, picturing not the houses across the street or the freeway behind them, but the ocean. I placed the shore just beyond the trees. The dull roar of the freeway fell away, became the dull roar of ocean waves, and I closed my eyes. I saw myself, shoeless, letting my toes squish in the brown, damp sand, hugging myself against the sea spray. I saw myself, and I was quiet and unnaturally content.
I opened my eyes, untwisted my legs and set them on the carpet. I pulled on a jacket and set out to meet Abigail halfway as she walked from the bus stop in that other world. As I walked, I pictured the salt air and the endless water stretching out, covering the houses, crashing over the freeways, drowning out the voices of men who wish for you not to love them and the sounds of girls crying into pillows, oceans dripping from their eyes.
AUGUST
1987
The days of summer flipped past like the pages of the books I was inhaling. The fan was perpetually on. There was a constant feeling of exhilaration, as if I was an actress on opening night, an opening night that occurred again and again.
The San Fernando Valley in August resembled an oven on broil. Nevertheless, I pulled on my trusty pair of gray wool shorts and a white, sleeveless blouse—tight in the right places, the color a flag of surrender.
I double-checked the phones. I picked each one up from its receiver, listened, and replaced it in its niche. Dial tones.
I called my mom at work to make sure she would be there until 3:30.
“Promise we’ll go to the store?” I asked timidly, and she bit the bait, agreed with me in a tired voice that she and I would pick up groceries together. I felt and sounded like the fourteen-year-old girl she knew me to be, though our relationship was plummeting like a car down a cliff in slow motion. I didn’t think about this for too long. I hung up the phone and knew I was home free.
I showered and sprayed myself with something in my mother’s bathroom that said it smelled like Obsession by Calvin Klein. After a quick flick of the wrist, spray floating gently around me, I walked barefoot into the living room and reclined on the mottled sofa. After scooting down to the side my mother favored, I was within reach of her pack of golden Marlboros. I enjoyed a leisurely cigarette, the smoke wafting out the locked screen. I crossed and recrossed my legs.
Aware of my bouncing leg and the rush of the nicotine entering my bloodstream, I stood and approached the front door. Through the dusty screen I could see the neighbors’ houses. In the house across the street, the one with the easel in the front window, the curtains were open wide. I was used to seeing the man who lived there; he watered his lawn pathologically in the afternoons. Sometimes, he and the woman who lived with him painstakingly cleaned the old, beautiful cars in their garage and driveway. I made up stories about them. She looked so much younger than him from where I was standing, I could swear that she and I had something in common. The stories sometimes involved me, and how the man might invite me into his house, drawing the curtains shut. (Years later, I would stand on his doorstep, and he would allow me entrance. They would prove themselves a charming and eccentric couple, and we would share a short, strange conversation as he sat in his antique dentist’s chair in the living room, cuddling a skull. “Robert Williams,” I would explain to my mother later in a Hollywood art gallery, “He’s this crazy artist, check out his paintings.”) But none of this was revealed to me on this day. His curtains were simply open and there was no sight of him, just the ghostly form of the large white easel in the corner of the picture window.
I savored each day I was still free from school. I woke up late, to the sound of the phone, my mother calling from work to growl at me to awaken and do some chores. Sometimes she sounded bored and girlish, wanting to chat. I relished each day that she left at six-thirty in the morning. I ruled the house until I heard the click-clack of her heels marching up the concrete walkway at four.
Every day I listened to my mother’s ongoing litany on the importance of keeping the door shut and bolted. If that was not possible due to the heat, the need for air circulation, I should at least remember to lock the screen.
Remembering this, I checked the lock on the screen.
I went back to the couch and reclined, feeling the slight breeze hit my bare shoulders, legs.
When I heard his Porsche pull up, I jumped. I threw myself back onto the couch but leaned forward and strained my eyes to make sure I could see the green vehicle parked in front of my house. When he started his way up the walk, I got up to unlock the screen. He was already at the door, peering in, touching the screen. He banged on it a couple of times so that I leapt to open it, and he entered, loud and sweet, calling out for my mom, my dad, the FBI, anyone to come on out and catch him.
I laughed and closed the heavy door behind him. Shut. Bolted.
There was an aura of danger we created, accompanied by perfect release. He barely kissed me but let his lips and tongue linger over my neck, my cheek, my chest. I leaned back on my mother’s couch and closed my eyes, fearful that eye contact would remind him that I was still fourteen and he was nearing twenty-nine.
We eagerly unbuttoned my shorts.
“Why the hell do you wear these all the time, do you know it’s a hundred degrees out?” he asked me. I wrapped my calves up against his thick neck in response.
There would be no penetration this time. I began to understand that it might never happen again, based on clues such as Jeff’s comfort level, his day at work, the potential for paranoia to strike after he ventured into my bedroom and was reminded I was a girl and not a woman.
So I remained, sighing against him, my heated breathing attempting to match his, attempting to keep us deep in the fantasy, deep in a charged, thick miasma of denial.
✵
I knew on one particular night in August that if my phone rang, it would not be Jeff’s voice.
He and his on-again, off-again girlfriend were going to a concert at Anaheim Stadium. David Bowie, my longtime idol, was headlining, with Siouxsie and the Banshees opening.
Jealousy clouded my vision, imagining Jeff and his girlfriend at the stadium. I told myself that they could probably not even appreciate the brilliant spectacle that was Siouxsie Sioux. Fucking straights. Old, I thought, he is old, too old to appreciate this.
Sio
uxsie’s lyrics were emblazoned on my closet door in blue marker:
The stars that shine
And the stars that shrink
In the face of stagnation
The water runs
Before your eyes…
I turned my stereo on, loud, turning the dial until I found the station I listened to most.
I heard the oceanic sound of a crowd cheering, a person on microphone. They were broadcasting live from Anaheim Stadium. The radio was bringing me to Jeff and his girlfriend. I imagined them probably stoned, and excited, and laughing in the midst of thousands of people shouting, stamping their feet, waving lighters, focused on the stage.
I stretched out on my bedroom floor and let the tears sting my eyes. My knees were raw and I heard a crack in my kneecap. I sat up quickly, blood rushing to my head. I crawled to the closet, pulled open the door, and let my hand run across the old backpacks and overnight bags on the floor until I found the heavy one, the one that concealed wine coolers and dank clothing to smother the clinking of bottles.
I lie back again on the carpet, careful to leave the opened Bartles and James behind the chair should my mother barge in. My mother had bought them in a moment of poor judgment, because she knew she wouldn’t touch them, and didn’t believe I would. They were confiscated when she left for work, and she never inquired of them again.
The crowd built to a climactic cheer.
I saw Mr. Ivers in my mind’s eye, with the woman I’d only seen photos of, a petite, busty woman with dark skin and curly black hair and a Persian name. The tears stopped abruptly, and I was left with a thought.
You’re a kid. A child. Not a woman. A girl. Not a girlfriend.
I sat up and took a long, hard swallow of the watermelon-tasting alcohol and set it down, keeping my hand around its body, fingering the torn label on the glass.
Swallowing diamonds
A cutting throat
Your teeth when you grin
Reflecting beams on tombstones…
✵
Goddamn him.
My body felt hot and prickly. If someone touched me, I thought I might explode into a million needles.
My head throbbed with a mantra.
I hurt I hurt I hurt.
Meanwhile, Anaheim Stadium was treated to the words on my wall, the beautiful confluence of orchestral maneuver and goth-voice of Siouxsie.
Would he remember that I have these words on my wall? Would he maybe think of me?
These questions deserved a swig of sickly sweet wine cooler. And another.
A jamboree of surprises
Playing Russian roulette
Or the lucky clip
A clenched fist to your heart
Coal dust on your lungs
I squeezed my eyes shut until my eyeballs ached.
I fumbled for the pack of Marlboros under the bed with its companions, ashtray and lighter.
A silver tongue for the chosen one
Heavy magnum in your side
Or a bloody thorn
This is bullshit, I thought. Here I am, fourteen. Cute (enough). Smart (enough). Right?
There was no answer.
I was wasting hours of my life pining away for this man that taunted me with his sexual innuendos. He tormented me with descriptions of the loud, jubilatory, reunited sex he and his girlfriend had, because, well, it had been soooo long. And, he told me, he knew it wouldn’t work out between them. But still he loved her.
Skating bullets on angel dust
In a dead sea of fluid mercury,
Baby piano cries, under your heavy
Index and thumb
Pull some strings—LET THEM SING
I smoked the cigarette hurriedly, hungrily. My nostrils flared.
The three of us, and all of Anaheim Stadium, and every person in Southern California who touched their radio dial and listened to this wailing, melancholy, beautiful voice—I thought everyone was witness to my error, my belief that I was worthy of this person’s love. Worthy of anyone’s love.
Dazzle
It’s a glittering prize
Clenched muscles. Tightened forehead. I scrunched my eyes shut and concentrated.
If I have a goddamn telepathic molecule in this body, just one, let me use it NOW, like FIRE beating its path to him…Jeff, you are fucking HURTING me and I love you like I have never loved anyone.
Siouxsie kept on.
The stars that shine,
And the stars that shrink…
NOTES ON AN EXCAVATION:
WHY I DIDN’T TELL
I didn’t want to be average.
I didn’t want it to end.
I was comfortable keeping secrets.
I was afraid of being blamed.
I felt responsible for his acts.
I was numb.
I was told I exuded sex and therefore I must be to blame.
The truth is, I did tell.
I didn’t want it to end.
I told an adult.
I grew comfortable with anguish. With hostility.
Tragedy.
I was numb.
That adult has since apologized for his inaction on my behalf, shared with me his fear of the situation, his own newness to the profession at the time.
I imagined courtrooms. Lawyers pointing at me. A brief on all my sexual exploits passed around, read aloud.
I was ashamed, so much so that I wasn’t sure I could live through something like that.
There were plenty of signs but I did not have parents who were capable of interpreting those signs.
I thought it was my karma.
There was even a social worker.
I get numb, still, thinking about this question.
I wanted sex.
I wanted to be the focal point of someone’s world.
When the social worker indicated that what I was talking about might be reportable, I left and never went back.
I wanted power.
I fight numbness regularly.
I thought there was something to learn from this.
I wanted love.
It would be years later that I would tell and tell and tell in a room, rooms a thousand miles north of where it all happened.
It’s like walking around a live mine. Say the wrong thing, move the wrong way, there could be casualties.
What would you say to a girl if you suspected something? Were told something?
I would ask careful, simple questions, after I listened.
How does he treat you?
What do you feel in his presence?
Where do the feelings go in your body when he’s not around?
Why is it a secret? What do you have to gain by keeping it a secret? And what do you have to lose?
SEPTEMBER
1987
Jeff picked me up on the street outside Notre Dame’s gates on a shortened class day.
He had not yet started his own school year; my new Catholic high school started in late August.
I wore the uniform I purchased three weeks before while obliterated on rum and Coke. I had to hold the bag between my body and the boy whose motorcycle I was riding on the back of. After that day, I could never drink rum again.
“So, I have this personal problem,” Jeff said as I climbed into his Porsche. He spoke again when we were blocks away from my school.
“I’ll show you,” he said, and steered us down a cul-de-sac. After a quick glance around, he unzipped his pants. My breath caught, unsure of what was happening. I looked down briefly at a patch of flesh, and then up, staring through the windshield. My teeth bit into the soft insides of my mouth.
“While I was on vacation I fucked around with some twenty-year-old chick and I think she ga
ve me something I’d rather not have. So I’m out of commission for awhile. Sorry to get your hopes up.”
“It’s okay,” I said, rearranging myself on the small seat. I looked forward, aware of the wool herringbone skirt on my thigh, my white blouse blazing in the sun. I felt a little sick. A swarm of bees entered my head, agitated. I tried to make my mouth smile.
“Let’s just drive around.” He motioned at the sky. “It’s beautiful out.”
Hansen Dam looked like death. I saw no water. My white anklet socks and my new burgundy penny loafers got covered in dust. I put a finger to my tongue and bent down to shine the pennies in their slits.
“A hawk!” Jeff called out.
We’d been standing apart for minutes. Fucked around. Twenty-year-old chick. I took a deep breath and looked into the sky. The sun beat down on my face, and I raised a hand to shield my eyes from the sun. A hawk circled the air high above us.
I looked back at Jeff. His posture was in reverence to the hawk, amazed and grateful. I watched them both and felt a slight smile. I blinked and put my hands on my hips, silent.
He kissed me goodbye when we arrived at the gas station near my house.
“Can I have another?” I asked in my version of sweetness. I lifted a knee and my skirt rode higher on my leg. I picked up my bag from the floor of the car.
“Nope. Sorry.”
My face crumpled before I could control myself. Before I knew it, words were spilling out.
“Just once, just once when I ask you for one, I hope you’ll give it to me!”
I paused for effect. I flung open the door, stepped out, slammed the door shut. I felt my skirt swish around the back of my thighs, where I hoped his eyes would travel. I started walking towards my house, each step heavy, forced, the muscles in my calves straining. He pulled out and sped away.
My phone rang at 10:30 that night.
Excavation: A Memoir Page 8