Commencement
Page 25
The girls told April everything. They were dying to tell. And besides, they thought of her as one of them. An older one, of course, because these girls were mostly thirteen, fourteen, seventeen years old. They had all gotten here through roughly the same route. Poverty, bad family life, probably some sexual abuse, absent parents. Then suddenly, a knight in shining armor appeared—a nice guy with a car who would take them out to dinner, tell them he loved them, shower them with compliments, then ask for a tiny favor.
He needed some money, he’d say, and if she would sleep with his best friend, the friend would give them five thousand bucks. Just this once, the girl would think. We’re in this together. He loves me. So she’d sleep with the friend, who of course didn’t really have five thousand dollars. But the girl would think, How easy. When her man asked her to do it again, more often, and sometimes with strangers, even if it made her feel wrong, she’d say yes. When he told her to dance topless in a club, and take strange men into the back room and do whatever they said, she’d obey.
Then would come the admission: “Baby, I’m a pimp. But I do love you.” Some of them didn’t even know what the word “pimp” meant. He would explain and reveal that he had other girls. He might bring her to live with them and, as an initiation, invite ten friends over to gang rape her in a bedroom, then have the more senior girls beat the shit out of her. But it didn’t really matter what he did. By now, she was complicit in all of it, a criminal whom no one wanted to help. And she loved him. That was the real kick in the ass about it, April thought. Once a woman fell in love, a man could set her on fire and she’d refuse to see the bad in him.
At night, April would lie in bed staring at the cracked ceiling, thinking about everything the girls on English Avenue had said. Their words haunted her. In the past, she and Ronnie had traveled for a week or a month at a time to gather research for a film. But this time, they were living in the midst of their subjects. April had come to know and care about the girls at the corner store—Linette and Rochelle, a pair of teenage sisters who had turned to the street when their single mother died. Angelika, a sweet, deep-voiced girl who looked about thirteen years old. Shaliqua, tough and foul-mouthed. On the day April met her, a john had broken her jaw, but she reported for duty all the same, fearing even worse treatment from her pimp if she went to the hospital or the police.
For the first time, April understood Sally’s version of feminism, and why she went to the domestic violence shelter week after week, helping new women each time but never even making a dent in the larger problem. Because when the individual women looked you in the face, you couldn’t help but want to make them safe immediately. When two sisters, just fifteen and seventeen, explained calmly that their mother died of a highly curable cancer because she had no health insurance, and then you had to watch those sisters get into cars with strange men day in and day out, you couldn’t help but want to rip the whole ugly, unjust world apart and start over from scratch.
One afternoon, when it began to pour, April invited the girls inside for coffee. All but Angelika declined.
Angelika walked next to April, smiling, talking about her life as if it were a happy tale. She was seventeen, born and raised in Baltimore, sold to Redd, her pimp, by a strip club owner back home when she was just fourteen.
When Ronnie saw the two of them come through the front door, she took April aside and hissed, “Too close, April. Get rid of her.”
April invited the girl over three or four times after that, always when Ronnie was away. The two of them would sit at the kitchen table, exchanging stories. Everything April said about her childhood was true, but she still felt guilty for lying to Angelika about who she was. Angelika told her she had been using crack, and sometimes heroin, since she was fourteen.
People tended to think that girls turned to prostitution to pay for drugs. They had that backward—most of the girls April met hadn’t touched drugs before they entered the life. But now they needed them to numb the pain, to keep themselves together. Ronnie said that post-traumatic stress disorder was more common among prostitutes than among veterans returning from combat.
“Motherfucking Red Lobster,” Ronnie screamed one night as they drank a bottle of cheap red wine.
Red Lobster was the restaurant of choice for the pimps when they were recruiting girls.
“That’s all it fucking takes to turn a child into a sex slave,” Ronnie said, banging her first on the table. “One basket of popcorn shrimp and a motherfucking Diet Coke, and these girls think it’s love. It’s not their fault, of course. They’re children from the ghetto, for fuck’s sake. Most of them have never been into a restaurant with forks and knives and actual menus. They think Red Lobster is the motherfucking Ritz-Carlton. These are babies we’re talking about.”
Alexa told them a story about a pair of sisters—just nine and ten years old—who had been incarcerated in Atlanta earlier that year. Cops picked them up on the Parkway and threw them into a locked facility after they approached an unmarked police car in traffic and asked if the undercover officers inside wanted blow jobs. One afternoon a few months later, two cops transported the sisters to the courthouse in the back of a squad car. The younger one wore stilettos and clutched a baby doll.
When the cops stopped at a red light, the girls started shrieking in the backseat.
“What is it? What do you girls want?” one of the officers said, kindly. She was a woman with kids of her own.
The girls pointed at a McDonald’s outside the window.
“Happy Meals!” the nine-year-old exclaimed. “Please?”
Happy Meals. Men were out there, buying sex from kids who still got giddy over Happy Meals.
Sometimes she couldn’t bear the weight of it. Late one night, April crept into Ronnie’s room while she was sleeping and gently pulled open the drawer where she knew her phone was stored, right beside Ronnie’s gun.
She longed to talk to Sally most of all, but when she remembered what Sally had said—that this whole mission was stupid—April knew she couldn’t do it. Sal would just tell her to leave, to go home to Chicago and get a boring desk job with Amnesty International or some shit. So she went to the kitchen and called Celia instead.
“It’s just too much,” April said. “We don’t matter in this world. Girls and women are constantly in danger and no one cares.”
Celia agreed. “Like what happened to me at Dartmouth,” she said.
She had not mentioned it since the night she first told them the story back in college. She went on, “I’ve wondered lots of times how that relates to the rest of it—strip clubs and pornos and prostitutes and all that. Men just come to believe that women are these objects, these disposable things.”
“How does it affect you now?” April asked.
There were girls she had met on the Parkway who had been raped innumerable times. One of them was truly gorgeous, leggy and lean, but all her teeth were missing. She told April that some john had taken her to a hotel room one night. She didn’t remember what had happened, but when she woke up, she had been badly beaten. He had knocked out her teeth. How could that girl ever look a man in the eye again, let alone learn to love one?
“For a couple of years after, the few times I had sex, I’d have really bad flashbacks,” Celia said. “I’d remember that stupid blue condom, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I hated sex. I hated penises, as weird as that sounds. Just the look of them. But I got through it. My mom helped me, surprisingly. I learned to separate so that now I don’t think about my rape as sex. Rape isn’t sex. It’s something else.”
“What would you do if you were ever in that position again?” April asked.
Celia responded without skipping a beat, as if she had thought of this before. “My one regret is that I didn’t even try to get away at Dartmouth. Not that you always have a choice, but I did. If I could, I’d kill a man before I ever let myself be raped again.”
Celia sighed, as if she were letting go of something. Then her tone br
ightened a bit. “Now, I genuinely love sex. I’m not always so wise about who I have it with, but that’s another story. I know Bree and Sally think that after what happened to me at Dartmouth I should only sleep with my future husband or something, but I refuse. I don’t want to be afraid of sex anymore.”
That was the problem, April thought. For women, sex would always offer pleasure and peril in equal parts.
She often wondered what the hell was wrong with men. Sex could be fun, natural, good. Why did they have to corrupt it? Why did so many of them prefer to have sex with a victim or a child rather than a willing partner? For that matter, why was it better to have sex with a stranger than with your own wife?
Alexa, their one real friend in the Bluff, had once lived in New York, where she married a john. He offered to take her away from the life, and she said yes, after watching a fellow prostitute and friend get shot in the head by a customer she had turned away.
They moved into a house in Queens. They had a baby girl. Alexa’s husband beat her with an electrical cord and engraved his initials into her breasts with a carving knife. One day she returned from picking their daughter up at school to find him fucking another woman right in their living room. “What are you looking at, bitch?” he said to her while their child was watching and he was still inside some stranger.
That’s when Alexa decided to move to Atlanta, where her sister lived. The court wouldn’t give her custody of her little girl because she had a long criminal record for prostitution and drugs. For the same reason, she couldn’t find a job. She went back to turning tricks, though she swore she’d never give a penny of her money to another man as long as she lived.
Ronnie had been married once, too, to a semi-famous movie actor (she wouldn’t say who). He left her for someone else, “a teenager,” Ronnie said. “I mean that literally. A literal fucking teenager. I think she was nineteen, but still.”
So many of the men that Americans considered great had been philanderers. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Einstein and Bill Clinton. And April’s own father, though of course very few people thought of him as anything special. Any shrink would probably say that it all went back to him—this stranger she had glanced at only once in the line for a port-o-potty, a man who had never come looking for her or sent her a birthday card or paid a dollar in child support.
Sex and power just go together; that was the party line. As if what these men had done was simply a lark, a bit of fun. In truth, they had treated women like things, like trash, and yet this did nothing to color the world’s opinion of their achievements. Even the pimps weren’t in much danger of being punished for their crimes. Most of them, Alexa said, had turned to pimping because it carried nowhere near the threat of arrest or jail time that drug dealing did. You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning.
CELIA
After just one week in New York, six men had asked Bree out. She kept saying no, but they kept asking. Celia had forgotten that Bree had this hold over guys. The last time she had had to compete with Bree for men was first year of college—back then it was a given that no matter how many girls went out, every guy at the party would want Bree most of all. Celia had decided then that feeling jealous of Bree would be like feeling jealous of the Venus de Milo: You were never going to be that beautiful, so why bother getting upset about it? (Though when Bree met Lara sophomore year and stopped partying with guys altogether, Celia had felt somewhat relieved by the thought of finally being seen as herself, rather than the plain Jane standing beside the movie star.)
Bree always looked gorgeous, of course, but it was more than just that. She exuded confidence and fun, even when she felt miserable and heartbroken.
They went out every night now, and every night new men pursued Bree. They didn’t want to take her home or kiss her sloppily behind the fire door. They actually wanted to call her and ask her out on proper dates. Celia had never witnessed such a thing in a New York bar, and she found it highly annoying. But she tried to remind herself that Bree was her best friend, and that she was due for a little self-esteem boost after everything she had been through recently.
On Friday night, Celia returned home from work to find Bree in the bathroom, her makeup bag bursting. She was applying a hot pink lipstick that would have looked absurd on anyone else, but made her look like a Barbie doll.
“What’s up?” Celia said, stepping into the cramped bathroom and perching on the edge of the tub.
“Remember that guy Adrian we met at the Ale House the other night?” Bree said.
“Yes.” He looked like a Disney character—tall, broad, wavy dark hair, and a gorgeous smile. You half expected to see little cartoon birds floating around his shoulders. Celia had seen him out in her neighborhood dozens of times, and he had never approached her. But when Bree walked through the door of the bar, he was drawn to her like a dumb dog is drawn into traffic. Celia had the urge to scream She’s a lesbian! and throw a beer right in his face.
“He’s cute,” Celia said now.
“Cute?” Bree said. “That boy could stop traffic in a gunnysack.”
Celia raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, I stole that from a Dolly Parton song,” Bree said. “But anyway, he asked me for my number while we talked, and I said I wasn’t interested. But when I woke up this morning, I checked my work e-mail, and I saw that he had written me on the office account. He must have searched online to find my e-mail address. Cute, right?”
“Definitely cute,” Celia said, trying to ignore her irritation. No man had ever searched for her. “So what did he say?”
“He asked me if I’d have dinner with him tonight,” Bree said. “I e-mailed him back to see if he still wanted to meet, and he responded right away and said yes. He’s picking me up at seven.”
“He’s picking you up?” Celia asked. It was another dating ritual that seemed impossible, prehistoric, in the city.
Bree nodded.
“Is it a date?” Celia asked.
“I guess so,” Bree said. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to if he just wants to be friends.”
“Well, I know he wants it to be a date, but I’m asking if you want it to be one.” Celia realized she was leaving out the most important question: Are you a lesbian or what?
Bree shrugged. “All I know is that the person I love decided to leave me without so much as a good-bye. If someone else wants to wine and dine me, who am I to stop him? It’s just dinner; I’m not gonna marry the guy.”
Celia smiled. I’m not gonna marry the guy was one of the lines most frequently uttered by single women who secretly wondered if they might be destined to marry the guy.
“Plus, you have your date with Barrel O’Daryl tonight, so if I don’t go, I’ll just be sitting home alone,” Bree said.
“Please stop calling him that,” Celia said. “I’m afraid I’ll accidentally blurt out ‘Barrel O’Daryl’ over drinks.”
“Or during sex,” Bree said. “Oh Barrel O’Daryl! B.O.D.! Oh, take me now Barrel O’Daryl!”
Celia rolled her eyes. “I’m begging you to stop.”
“Tell me about him,” Bree said, dipping a gigantic blush brush into a huge vat of pink powder. “What does he do again?”
The rosy powder fell like fairy dust to the bathroom floor.
“He says he’s a film producer, which probably means he shoots video footage of toy soldiers in his mom’s basement in the Bronx,” Celia said.
“Where did he go to school?” Bree asked.
“I don’t know,” Celia said. “Probably the University of Florida at Marzipan.”
Bree snorted. “What the hell is that?”
“I just made it up. He seems like one of those guys who went to a college no one’s ever heard of.”
“Jeez, why are you so down on him already?” Bree said.
“I don’t know, I guess I’ve learned not to get my hopes up,” Celia said.
The next morning, Celia woke up to the sound of raindrops on the air conditioner. It was the first week of August, and even with the damn thing set to high, the apartment was sweltering. She slugged out of bed to find Bree sitting on the couch in her underwear, watching the Today show with a smear of white cream bleach over her lip.
Celia sat down beside her. “Morning, sexy.”
“I have to get rid of my ’stache,” Bree mumbled, trying not to move her lips too much.
“You’re blonde, you don’t have a ’stache,” Celia said. “So? How was the big date?”
When she had returned from her own ill-fated date around midnight, Bree was still out.
Bree looked like she was about to speak. Instead, she raised a finger to let Celia know she would be right back, and then dashed into the bathroom. She returned a moment later with her face bleach-free.
“Coffee?” she asked. “I just made a pot.”
Celia smiled. “Yes, please.”
When Bree returned with the coffee, she was beaming.
“What’s going on?” Celia said, reaching out to take one of the steaming mugs.
“Adrian is amazing,” Bree said. “He’s so funny and so sweet. He volunteers as a Big Brother, and he loves mountain biking and he does tons and tons of pro bono work at the firm. Oh! And his favorite movie is Last Night. Same as mine. And we both love sushi and Kurt Vonnegut and the Carpenters. What guy loves the Carpenters?”