The Most Dangerous Thing

by Leanne Lieberman

  Zeyda looks up at my sweaty head. “Did you run a marathon to get here?”

  “No, I just biked up to UBC and back.”

  “For fun?”

  “Yes.”

  Zeyda shakes his head. “Meshugganah”—crazy—he mumbles.

  “It’s fun,” I say. My phone pings, and I pull it out of my bike bag. Paul has written, I looked for you after school.

  At my gf’s, I write back.

  Can I call you later?

  I send a smiley face.

  “Is that boy writing you again?” Zeyda asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “You can call him Paul, not that boy.”

  “The one that’s not Jewish.”

  “Yes, Zeyda.” I sigh, sitting down in a deck chair next to him. “I’m putting my phone away, and Paul’s not going to text me anymore. I’m here to see you.” I pat his knee. “How’s the shipping industry today? Any cruise ships out?”

  “He’s your boyfriend?” Zeyda asks.

  I shrug. “Not sure.” It’s too complicated to explain to Zeyda.

  Zeyda cocks his head to the side. “What do you mean? Either he is or he isn’t.”

  “It’s too early to define things. We’re friends.”

  “Friends today, but tomorrow he’ll be your boyfriend, and poof, there goes the Jewish people.”

  I roll my eyes and flop back in my chair.

  “Paul and I are just friends, and even if we were—” I struggle for the right word. Dating? Going out? “—more than friends, it doesn’t mean we’re getting married or anything.”

  Zeyda shakes his finger at me. “Look at what happened to your mother’s friend’s daughter, that Rachel. They were only friends to start. Your generation is ruining Judaism.”

  Zeyda’s referring to Mom’s friend Miri’s daughter, who married a non-Jewish guy, Carter, last year.

  I roll my eyes again, and Zeyda asks me, “Your parents know about this non-Jewish boy?”

  “No, but not because he’s not Jewish. Because he’s, well, he’s a boy. And he’s not really my boyfriend. And it’s private.” I look down at my shoes.

  “Oh.” Zeyda smiles and pats my hand. “Then I won’t say anything.”

  That’s just like Zeyda, to get fired up about something, but then understand when he’s crossed a line, when I need his help. “Let’s talk about something else,” he says.

  I nod. “Yes. I didn’t come to argue with you.”

  “Fine. Let’s play a game.”

  “Checkers?”

  Zeyda nods again. “I bet you five dollars I can beat you.”

  “You’re on.”

  I get the game from the cupboard, and we play three games. Zeyda wins the first two, but I win the last game, so I only owe him five dollars. When I try to pay him, he pushes my money away. “You’ll win it back next time,” he says.

  I kiss him on the top of his head and bike home. The sun has come out, as if to remind the city it still exists, and it lingers along the horizon. At least the days are getting longer, the rainiest part of the year almost over. I feel the fog less in the summer.

  Usually the stop-and-go nature of biking in the city—the endless traffic lights, the slow-moving vehicles, the need to worry about car doors being flung open in front of me—frustrates me, but tonight I’m thinking about what would happen if I went back to Paul’s house, back to that couch in the basement, back to lying next to him. I press against my bike seat and almost sail through an intersection. While I wait for the light to change, I force myself back to reality. I spend the rest of the ride home focusing on the traffic.

  When I get home Mom is in the kitchen, making hamburgers and corn on the cob. “Isn’t Dad supposed to cook tonight?” I ask.

  “He’s volunteering at the hospice tonight, so I said I would do his dinner.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “I still don’t get what he’s doing with sick people.”

  “I think it’s nice,” Mom says, her hands in the raw hamburger.

  I slump into a chair to check my phone. Paul has texted, How was your grandfather?

  Crazy, I write back.

  “How was school?” Mom asks.

  “Fine,” I say, not looking up.

  Why crazy? Paul asks.

  I’ll have to tell you in person, I type back.

  Want to come over?

  Sorry, family dinner. Maybe tomorrow. I could go see Paul after dinner, but after being with Zeyda and then biking home, I want to sit quietly. And I can’t deal with all the excitement of Paul. I still need to think about how to be with him. That could take forever.

  “Who are you texting?” Mom asks.

  “Just my lab partner, Paul.”

  I glance at Mom to see if she’ll ask anything about Paul, but all she says is “Did you see Zeyda today?”

  “Yes, he was grumpy and extra crazy.”

  “What else is new? Is he still refusing to come to the Seder?”

  “We didn’t even get to that.”

  “Maybe we’ll kidnap him and bring him here.”

  “He’d be miserable and ruin it for you.” I drift out of the kitchen and head downstairs. From the doorway of my room I see the closet waiting for me, the door slightly open. You don’t need to go in there, I tell myself. It’s just a habit. And there’s no fog today—at least, not much. Still, I feel like sitting in the closet, hiding out from the world for a bit. I won’t though. That’s for desperate times. Instead, I go into the tent in the other room, lie down and close my eyes.

  After dinner I’m hoping to hang out and do some homework in front of the TV, but Mom’s invited her Jewish music group over to practice Passover songs. The entire upstairs vibrates with competing guitars and jangling tambourines. Someone’s even brought a bongo. Then Abby troops downstairs with Sunita and three other girls I recognize from school.

  “Oh,” Abby says when she sees me in the tent. “We were going to rehearse here tonight.”

  I look up at the girls clutching their bags and their scripts. Great. Now the vagina monologues aren’t only at my school—they’re at my house. I get up and go into my room and try to focus on my poetry assignment.

  Upstairs, someone’s tapping their feet vigorously, making my light fixture jiggle. From across the hall I hear Sunita and Abby laughing loudly. I pick up my pen and scribble in my journal, I need a new space, a new place without the music and vagina talk. Place, space, race, your face, makes me turn into a head case, I’m such a waste.

  I could call Paul and go to his house, and we could work or watch TV. It would be okay if I called him, but I haven’t figured out what to do about being with him, and I’m too exhausted to talk about that. Fear, your ear, the sweet edge of it, warm and pulsing, so near. I’ll never be able to hand in any of these lines for class. Paul rhymes with tall, but it also rhymes with wall and fall. What is a poem anyway?

  Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back to Paul’s. We could make dinner together and play pool in the basement. And then we’d kiss again, and his hands would be in my hair, on my skin. We might be on that leather couch in the basement. I feel my face flush thinking about it. And then what, we’re naked on the couch? I open my eyes and grab my hair. I can’t even think about kissing Paul, let alone… I am ridiculous, and I hate myself. Hate is my fate, second rate, take cover from being a lover, never are you to be loved.

  I hear giggling from the other room. I slam my writing book closed and sit on the basement stairs by the open door to the rec room, listening.

  “Well, I’m working on my cunt monologue,” Abby says.

  “And we have Jay’s monologue about wanting a vagina,” one of Abby’s friends, Emma, adds.

  “We need to ask him,” Abby says, “if he still wants to be in it even though it’s not part of the festival.”

  “I think we should agree to call him she,” Emma says.

  “Oh, is that what…she wants?” Sunita asks.

  “Yes,” Emma says.

  “Fine. We’ll ask Jay if sh
e wants to perform her monologue,” Abby says.

  Abby and her friends continue organizing their monologues. One of the girls is going to perform a monologue about consent, and Emma wants to talk about periods and the ridiculousness of tampon ads. “Can you imagine,” she says, “if there was actually an ad with a girl having cramps and feeling horrible?”

  “You should create a mock ad for Advil of a girl with a heating pad shoved down her pants,” Sunita says.

  “Yes!” Abby says. “I love it! We could have a chorus of tampons in the background, barbershop style, singing a menstrual doo-wop.”

  I bury my head in my hands.

  Then Abby says, “Let’s make sure the performance isn’t too heavy overall, that it’s not only the gloom and doom of sexuality. This has to be about the glory of vaginas, about what a woman’s body can do.”

  I wince as the girls giggle.

  “My monologue is going to be about girl lust,” Sunita says. “That should balance it out.”

  I wince again.

  Only Abby has finished her monologue, so she reads it to the other girls. I know I should run away and not listen, but I’m too curious. It’s the kind of curiosity I wish I didn’t have, like watching a movie where you know there’ll be a train wreck and you know you should turn away, but you can’t.

  Abby begins reading: “My grandmother could never say the word vagina. Instead she called her girl parts a knish, which is a Jewish word for a potato-stuffed pastry. It’s a yummy thing to eat, and I think my grandmother must have had a positive vision of her body, even if she couldn’t say the word vagina.”

  OMG. I want to shove my fingers in my ears or walk away, but I don’t. I pull a pillow over my head to muffle the sound.

  Abby continues, “I have issues with the word vagina too, so I almost never say it. I thought it was because I didn’t like the sound of the v, the awkward g. Instead I call girl parts hoo-haw or froo-froo, but those are baby words that belittle women’s bodies. Mostly I say girl parts.

  “Boys and men have lots of awful words for vaginas, like twat and hole. There are tons of other awful words on the Internet. I don’t know why you would demean something so amazing, something that gave you life, with those words.

  “Some people are resolved to call it what it is and shudder their way through vagina, the proper word, but that’s not good enough for me either. Vagina is only part of the parts, not the whole deal, and if you were to look up the meaning of the word, you’d find it means ‘scabbard.’ What’s that, you say? Well, it’s a sheath for a knife, and if you ask me, I don’t have a vagina, if that’s what it means. Girl parts are so much more.

  “Do we have a word for the whole thing, all the girl parts together? We do. It’s called a cunt. Now stay with me. I know you’re thinking, Isn’t that dirty? Isn’t that the worst word you can think of? Isn’t that a swearword you rarely hear used? It hasn’t made it to radio or casual swearing. Not like fuck or shit.”

  I cringe when Abby says the c-word. How long is this monologue anyway? Abby goes on.

  “Cunt may be a swearword now, a curse, but it wasn’t always so. In many languages, from Irish to Chinese, from Arabic to Latin, cunt was a word for witches, priestesses, for women and for goddesses. Cunt was a word of praise. In many Middle Eastern and African languages, cunta meant ‘woman.’ It is only now that it means negative things, like ‘whore’ and ‘bitch’ or worse. It is only now that we hate our bodies so much that our most private girl parts, which used to be holy, are called by the worst word we know. I say let’s reclaim the word for our bodies. Let’s make cunt sacred again. Let’s protect, love and treasure women’s bodies. Let’s use a word for women’s parts that will shield us from rape, from gender mutilation, from shame. Let’s use a word for our bodies that celebrates their power. I don’t have only a vagina, I have a cunt.”

  Abby finishes and the other girls pause, letting the words sink in, and then they clap. I let myself collapse back on the stairs. Good god. She’s going to say that at school? In front of an audience? With teachers present? Even listening to her in the basement of my own house is too much. I’ll have to be sick that day. I stumble back to my room, close the door and turn on some music to drown out any more girl-parts talk or the sound of Mom’s music group thumping out “Dayenu” with tambourines.

  And if I was going to write a vagina monologue? Well, I wouldn’t. But if I did, it would be called “My Cunt Is Sleeping.” I take out my journal and scribble, My cunt isn’t talking to you right now because it’s not interested, thank you very much. It doesn’t even like to make eye contact. It’s a non-contact cunt. Except I wouldn’t call it a cunt or a vagina or anything else. It’s like Voldemort, the Place That Cannot Even Be Named.

  I slam my journal shut and lie back on the bed with my fingers jammed in my ears. I try to think about Paul—his smile, the way he tugs on my hand or gets excited about clouds and mushrooms. I like how he scratches his head with his pencil when he’s thinking about a quadratic equation.

  And I like how he kissed me.

  But I’m the girl who’s too freaked out to kiss him back.

  Eight

  I WAKE UP EARLY THE NEXT MORNING before it’s light out, as if my body is giving me an extra hour to convince myself to get up. I’m bored with Sudoku, so I do KenKen, and then I try a crossword, but I suck at it. Numbers are easier than words, more reliable. I recite square roots as high as I can. When the light starts to creep around the blinds, I get out of bed and shower. Fog, I will ignore you, tell you to fuck off. Fuck off, fog. I rub at my head. I wash my hair and then straighten it and add little braids at the front for something to do. I spend a long time trying to decide what to wear, pulling out half the clothes in my closet and trying on three different outfits before settling on jeans, silver flats and a gray polka-dot shirt. It’s still early, only 6:30 AM. I take out my journal and jot down a few early-morning words: fog, stuck in a bog, a heavy weight that can’t wait, darkness pressing me down, until I’m so thin you can drive over me. Paul, come and puff me up, until I’m floating.

  All of this sucks.

  I go upstairs and make scones for everyone’s breakfast, filling the house with the smell of blueberries and cornmeal. At least everyone else will wake up in a good mood.

  The fog burns off as I make my way through the day, as the sun starts to slant through the sky. By the time I get to writing class, I feel like I can handle life, like I might make it to the weekend. Then Mrs. Lee has us do a free-write called “I Fear.”

  “Write about what scares you most,” she says. “Don’t edit as you go along or judge what you’ve written. Keep your pen moving, and if you go off on a memory or a tangent, keep writing.”

  Everyone pulls out paper and pens or starts tapping away on personal devices. I pull out my journal and feel the fog rise higher in my head. What am I scared of? Where to start?

  I write, I’m scared of this class and what might happen when we hand in assignments, and I’m very scared of Paul and talking to him. I’m scared of him liking me and me liking him back. I’m scared of talking to him and maybe doing other things, and even thinking about those things scares me. I’m scared Sofia might say something to him and screw everything up. I’m scared he’s going to touch me and I’ll fall apart. I chew on the end of my pen for a moment now that I’ve got that all written down. I’m scared of crashing on my bike and losing all my teeth. I’m scared of the ocean coming up onto Zeyda’s house if there’s a tsunami and I’m scared he’ll get senile and I won’t want to visit him anymore. Then Crystal will quit and he’ll have to go to a home and he won’t ever talk to me again. I’m scared of losing Zeyda’s money on the stock market, and I’m scared of grade twelve and everything after that.

  I stop to take a breath and shake out my hand. I want the time to be up, for Mrs. Lee to say, “Okay, everyone, stop,” but she doesn’t, so I start writing again. I’m scared the fog will be so big and so heavy that I won’t be able to get up. Mom wi
ll come down, and I’ll look so pathetic, and she’ll say, “C’mon, Syd,” but I won’t be able to move. I’m scared to think about what would happen next. I stop, even though Mrs. Lee hasn’t told us to. There it is, the fog, written down on paper. I feel exhausted. Then I scratch out the last paragraph until the paper rips, and I’m so busy doing that, I don’t even notice the time’s up and people have stopped writing. Mrs. Lee is saying, “Now write what you aren’t scared of. Write about the things you know you can do.”

  I take a deep breath. This is easier, safer. I’m not scared of monsters or wild dogs or coyotes or steep hills. I’m not scared of failing math or chem. I’m not scared of going to university or dark lanes or ogres, fairies or beasts. I’m not scared of riding my bike or Abby or even her play. Embarrassed, yes, but not scared.

  Mrs. Lee says we should start thinking about our poetry portfolios and continue to read the poems she’s assigned for the course. She says to reread our in-class writing to start a poem. I glance back through my writing. I pray no poems come out of these fears. By the time class ends I feel like I need to lie down instead of heading to Mandarin.

  I stop in the bathroom and duck into a stall, my journal like contraband under my arm. I can’t leave those words lurking in my handwriting, so I grab the pages and rip them out of the book. Half the pages get stuck in the tightly sewn binding, leaving an ugly ruffle of paper. I want to find scissors and cut the ruffle out, make my book tidy again, but scissors won’t fix the mess. I hesitate in the stall. I’d planned to rip the pages into little pieces and flush them down the toilet, but the bell rings and I have to get going, so I stick the pages back in the book and shove the journal between the pages of my Mandarin workbook. It feels like I’m carrying a bomb that might detonate at any moment, so I make a detour to my locker and drop the journal in my backpack, even though it makes me late for class.

  After school Paul is waiting for me by my locker, as if it’s a normal thing for him to do. I can’t resist smiling at him, even though I’m exhausted from writing class and stressed from a pop quiz we had in Mandarin.