by Roxane Gay
My mother took me to confession once a week, on Thursdays after school. I waited in the pews while she confessed her sins and I would try to hear what she was saying so I might have a clearer sense of what God expected. I was, for a time, a good girl. I got good grades. I had good manners. I said please and thank you. I wore skirts of an appropriate length. When I sat in the confessional, I couldn’t breathe. I hated being in that dark tight place. I sat there and listened to the priest, Father Garibaldi, how he would lick his dry lips and urge me to confess, to confess, to repent. He smelled like garlic. He once gave me a pamphlet, A Young Person’s Guide to the Rosary and Confession. I learned about the joyful, the sorrowful, the glorious mysteries of the rosary and how to go to confession, how to use the Ten Commandments as my moral guide. I would hear his frustration when I still had nothing to say, when I was unable to account for my misdeeds.
Popular teenage boys travel in packs. Steven Winthrop was the leader of a pack of five. Wherever Steven and his friends went, they moved in disciplined formation, their strides perfectly matched, arms swinging at the same speed. They knew how to fill the space around them. His friends believed in Steven Winthrop more than they believed in God. In A Young Person’s Guide to the Rosary and Confession, the First Commandment stated, “I am the Lord your God; thou shall have no strange Gods before me.” We defied our immortal salvation for Steven Winthrop. We did so with joy in our hearts. You too have always been popular. I have seen the evidence in your childhood bedroom, meticulously preserved by your mother. Even now, you have packs of men following you, willing to make you their strange god. That is the only thing about you that scares me.
You lost your virginity during your sophomore year in college. You think it is almost shameful that you waited when people thought you hadn’t. You think it is trite that you loved the first girl you ever made love to, that you planned your first time the way you plan everything—with a great deal of consideration and attention to detail. You cried after your first time because you finally felt complete. You told me this on our first real vacation, ten days in Barcelona when we didn’t talk about work or our families or anything ugly. Instead we embarrassed ourselves when we spoke our college Spanish and visited castles and cathedrals and walked up and down Las Ramblas. We talked about how small we felt in the world and all the people who brought us to each other. You think I lost my virginity my junior year in college to a guy named Ethan. You laughed when I told you this fable, said there was no way a man named Ethan could satisfy a woman. You said you loved that I waited, too. You said you wish you had waited for me. I said I wish I had been given the choice and then I changed the subject.
On a perfect Thursday afternoon in June, when I was still so much just a girl, Steven Winthrop took me to our secret place in the woods. As I rode behind him, I kept staring up at the clear shafts of light piercing through the canopy above. I laughed and laughed and I shouted, “I love you!” into the wind. He turned back at me and grinned. When we got to the cabin, Steven Winthrop’s pack was waiting for me. They offered me warm cans of beer but I said no. They cracked jokes. I pretended to laugh. I pulled Steven Winthrop aside, said I didn’t want to hang out with his friends. I tried to leave but those boys were far bigger than me. They blocked the doorway and they laughed. They said, “This one is going to fight,” and they said they had always wanted a little taste of brown sugar. I stood in the middle of the cabin as it became dark and tight. I couldn’t breathe.
A therapist once told me that with time and distance memories fade. He lacked imagination or compassion. He also told me I was too pretty to have any real problems. I started seeing him because I was eating everything in sight. From the moment I woke up until I went to sleep I stuffed myself with food. I ate past the point of disgust, until I could see my stomach rolling and misshapen beneath my skin. I was never hungry but I ate and kept eating until the people I knew stopped recognizing me. I ate until I made myself sick, until I made everyone I knew sick to look at me so I would never be trapped in a terrible place again. I won’t ever go back to being a grotesquerie of flesh but at the time I needed someone to give me a reason to stop, to feel safe and that therapist, he sat in his expensive Herman Miller chair with his legs crossed effeminately and he helped me catalog my beauty but had nothing else to offer.
Steven Winthrop said, “I’m going first.” That’s when I understood. He ordered his pack to hold me down. The boys dug their fingers into my wrists and ankles and I screamed so loudly my voice unraveled. Steven Winthrop howled while he fucked me. He pounded his fists against my chest. He shouted, “I am the virgin hunter!” and his friends laughed and shouted in unison, “He is the virgin hunter!” Steven Winthrop’s sweat fell into my eyes and then I was blind. I could not see. He smelled so ugly—sour and metallic—and his body was so heavy. He was rabid. He whispered in my ear, called me baby. He told me I liked it. When he came, he groaned loudly in my ear, stayed on me, panting for a long time. His sweat stained me. His pack grew impatient so Steven Winthrop rolled off and pulled his pants up in one motion and then he lay on his side watching. When our eyes met, he didn’t look away. He smiled.
The pack took their turns. Their bodies were hard, muscular, demanding, insatiable. They tore me apart. They didn’t care that I fought. The smallest of the pack was the cruelest, the most determined to undo me. The more wildly I resisted, the louder they brayed. After an hour or so, Steven Winthrop and his pack took a break, breathless and sweaty. They congratulated each other; they were proud. I sat in the corner of the cabin, my knees pulled to my chest. I stared up through a hole in the ceiling at the perfect sky on a perfect June day. When they started again, I stopped fighting. I just looked into the sun as it set and I looked into the dusky sky and I looked into the early dark of night.
Later, after the rest of the pack went home, Steven Winthrop helped me get dressed. Of all his cruelties, his kindness was the worst. He spit on my torn underwear and used it to wipe my face clean before slipping it into his pocket. He pulled my jeans up over my thighs and gently buttoned them. He kissed my navel and the bruises flowering around it. He pulled my T-shirt over my head and put his letter jacket around my shoulders. He kissed my forehead and told me I was a good girl. We were silent as we walked our bikes home. He escorted me all the way to the edge of my driveway. My parents came running out. They shrieked that they were worried sick and had called the police. They asked Steven where he had found me, their voices pitching even higher.
“I found her wandering in the woods while I was looking for my dog,” Steven said. “I wish I could have found her sooner.” My parents grew silent, took a hard look at me, said they hardly recognized me. They tried to hug me but I held my hands in front of my body, backed away, begged them to please not touch me, to just let me be. My mother shook her head slowly, holding her hand over her mouth. She cried. My father ran into the house to call an ambulance and when he returned, he thanked Steven for helping me. My father’s hands shook as he took Steven’s in his, squeezed them tightly. He told Steven to get inside before his parents worried, said there were dangerous people in the world, said the police might want to talk to him. Steven flashed his perfect smile but could no longer look me in the eye as he leaned in, held my wrist, kissed my cheek. I moaned softly and hunched over, vomiting into the bed of yellow daisies surrounding the mailbox.
At the hospital, detectives and social workers and doctors and nurses asked me who had done this terrible thing. They took pictures and plucked and scraped and splayed me open like the deer on the scale and gambrel. They asked more questions, gave me a gray jogging suit, said they needed my clothes. I said nothing. I couldn’t breathe. I wished for rain to find me, to fall, to wash everything clean. It was almost three in the morning when we returned home, my father driving, muttering angrily through gritted teeth. I sat in the back with my mother, Steven Winthrop’s letter jacket still draped around my shoulders. As we walked into the house, I saw him watching from his bedroom. I let his
jacket fall off my shoulders and onto the ground. After I took a shower, my mother sat on the edge of my bed, brushing wet curls away from my face. She twisted her wedding ring back and forth nervously. She said, “You don’t ever have to talk about this.” She said, “We can pretend this never happened.” I didn’t and we did.
Venison is peculiar meat—muscular and gamy, tough to digest but popular in many circles. I do not care for venison. I don’t trust any meat slaughtered in the wild. You like to hunt, spending ten days in the woods each fall with your father and brother, huddled in tiny deer blinds, doused in deer piss, your fingers numb with cold. Hunting makes you feel like a man, you say. Every season you bring me butchered venison, venison sausage, venison jerky, ground venison. Your mother gave us a deep freezer and we store your spoils in the basement, carefully labeled. The word venison comes from the Latin word venari, to hunt. I find that cruel, to name something for that end which comes to pass.
You are the joy in my life. I am a mess but I will be the joy in yours. What we have is a perfect thing, like the baby or the idea of a baby we once had, how our unborn child was this sacred secret we held between our hearts. When you touch me, you feel through me, through the ugliness beneath my skin, you make me feel, you hold me together, you push my skin back into its proper place. When you see me next, I will be wearing your ring on my left finger. I will say yes. You will hear me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Versions of these stories have appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, NOON, Barrelhouse, West Branch, Monkey Bicycle, Night Train, Oxford American, Twelve Stories, the Collagist, Hobart, Acappella Zoo, Annalemma, Pear Noir, Word Riot, Storyglossia, Minnesota Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, the Literarian, The Normal School, Copper Nickel, Joyland, and Black Warrior Review. I am grateful to all the editors who originally published these stories. I want to especially recognize Elizabeth Ellen, who picked my story “North Country” out of the submission queue at Hobart, making it possible for that story to be included in Best American Short Stories.
Amy Hundley is the gracious steward of my words. Maria Massie is the agent who asked me what my writing dream was and has made it come true. To say thank you to her would not begin to be adequate. Nonetheless, thank you. John Mark Boling is my beloved publicist at Grove and I am always grateful for how he gets my fiction out into the world. I would also like to thank Amanda Panitch, Clare Mao, Jami Attenberg, Lisa Mecham, Mensah Demary, M. Bartley Seigel, Alissa Nutting, Aubrey Hirsch, Devan Goldstein, Tayari Jones, Brian Leung, Krista Ratcliffe, Trinity Ray, Kevin Mills, Sylvie Rabineau, Terry McMillan, Channing Tatum (with particular appreciation for his neck), Beyoncé (with particular appreciation for the Lemonade album), and Law & Order: SVU.
I am grateful for my immediate family, who are my most ardent cheerleaders and keepers of the real—Michael and Nicole Gay, Michael Gay Jr., Jacquelynn Camden Gay and Parker Nicole Gay, Joel Gay and Hailey Gay, Mesmin Destin and Michael Kosko, Sony Gay, and Marcelle Raff.
Last but never least, I thank Tracy, my first and last reader, best friend, motivator, secret keeper, heart holder.
CREDITS
The following stories first appeared in these publications.
“I Will Follow You” originally appeared in slightly different form in West Branch 72, Winter 2013; and in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
“Water, All Its Weight” originally appeared in slightly different form under the title “The Weight of Water” in Monkeybicycle 7, copyright © 2010 by Monkeybicycle Books.
“The Mark of Cain” originally appeared in slightly different form in Night Train.
“Difficult Women” originally appeared in slightly different form under the title “Important Things” in Copper Nickel, 2013.
“FLORIDA” originally appeared in slightly different form under the title “Group Fitness” in the Oxford American Issue 80, Spring 2013.
“La Negra Blanca” originally appeared in slightly different form in The Collagist Issue Three, October 2009.
“Baby Arm” originally appeared in slightly different form in Rick Magazine, formerly The Mississippi Review Online.
“North Country” originally appeared in slightly different form in Hobart 12; Best American Short Stories 2012; and New Stories from the Midwest 2012.
“How” originally appeared in slightly different form in Annalemma Issue 6.
“Requiem for a Glass Heart” originally appeared in slightly different form in A Cappella Zoo Issue 3, Fall 2009.
“In the Event of My Father’s Death” originally appeared in slightly different form in Pear Noir! #3.
“Break All the Way Down” originally appeared in slightly different form in Joyland, 2013.
“Bad Priest” originally appeared in slightly different form in Storyglossia Issue 34, July 2009.
“Open Marriage” originally appeared in slightly different form in the Minnesota Review Issue 80, 2013.
“A Pat” originally appeared in slightly different form in NOON, 2012.
“Best Features” originally appeared in slightly different form in Barrelhouse Online, November 2010.
“Bone Density” originally appeared in slightly different form in Word Riot.
“I Am a Knife” originally appeared in slightly different form in The Literarian Issue #4.
“The Sacrifice of Darkness” originally appeared in slightly different form in American Short Fiction Vol. 15, Issue 55.
“Noble Things” originally appeared in slightly different form in A Public Space Issue 21, Summer 2014.
“Strange Gods” originally appeared in slightly different form in Black Warrior Review 37.2.