I don’t know if he’s talking about the snow, or the kiss, or the fact he used to be my teacher, and I am a young woman, his muse. I cast my mind about, trying to find something clever to say, to show him I take responsibility for the kiss, for what it means, but I need more time to make sense of what I am feeling. All I know in this moment is that he should kiss me again, before something is lost. I don’t have the words to say why.
‘It’s okay. I want this.’
This is all that comes out, a kind of plea. I do not want to stay on this precipice any longer.
He sways, glistens, and begins to undress me.
‘Fuck.’
Hands on my breasts, then his mouth. One suck of each nipple, a brand new sensation felt deep in my belly. And then he is kneeling, his mouth moving from thigh to thigh, before his tongue pushes inside me. I don’t move.
‘Alice.’
Two fingers now, his tongue finding nerve. I see a match lit behind my eyes. Still, I don’t move.
‘Alice. You are so goddamn beautiful.’
Harder now. Deeper. His fingers spark, I feel like fire. It’s okay. I want this.
‘Alice.’
He keeps saying my name, only it sounds like someone else’s name now. Some other girl he first saw when she was sixteen years old and he was closer to forty. After her mother had died, leaving her alone and sad, and before he looked at her the way he does now.
‘Please, Mr Jackson,’ I say over his head, because I know I am not going to take that two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the stack still sitting there on the table. And because I don’t want to be alone and sad anymore. I want him to help me forget my pain, dissolve it. And it does rise to the surface, scatter across my skin, as he enters me slowly, saying my name over and over, the sky now black outside, and me swirling, like snow.
He tells me I’m like the sky. That storm clouds pass across my face, and just as quickly it’s clear skies, bright and shining. He says that’s what he’s trying to capture when he draws me, or takes those pictures, but he can’t keep his hands away long enough now, and there is always another way for us to touch that gets in the way of the art. I’m getting quite good at it, too. I know where to place my hands, and my mouth. He’s teaching me what to do, how to move my hips, what to say. I even let him film me sometimes, so that it’s me with the glazed eyes, twisting and moaning like the women in those videos he showed me a lifetime ago.
‘How many were there before me?’ he asked, that first, next morning.
‘Um. Three.’
I buried my face in his shoulder. Embarrassed. He had taught two of the boys at the high school.
‘How old were you the first time, Alice?’
‘Fifteen.’
Fifteen. My mother had committed suicide just months before and a boy wanted to say sorry. He was careful and clumsy, and it was over in a minute. ‘Sorry,’ he actually said, right at the end, and I was never sure for what, exactly. I felt nothing, did nothing. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t even bad. It was just nothing, because I couldn’t feel anything at all back then.
Two and three were about trying to feel something, trying to feel anything at all. Wanting to be like the other girls in my class. Like Tammy, who told me what it was like to come—‘Like your body is a firework!’ That’s what I wanted, to feel like I was exploding, disintegrating, and that’s not what it was like at all. With two and three, I felt heavy, stuck.
‘They weren’t … it wasn’t … very good.’
But Mr Jackson wasn’t listening. You can tell by someone’s eyes when they’re not listening, and his had taken on that familiar sheen.
‘Fifteen? God, I’m a pervert for saying this, but that turns me on. See …’
And he placed my hand on him, moved it up and down.
‘Did you do this?’
I shook my head, no.
‘Did you do this?’
He pushed my head down.
‘Did you do this?’
Sliding himself in and out of my mouth, watching me, smiling when I shook my head again. No.
‘Alice.’
His invocation. My name as a kind of summoning. No, Mr Jackson, I did not do any of this. I would not have known how. In fact, I barely recognise the girl I’ve become.
It’s as if he has dismantled my life and put me back together a whole different way.
The first time I come, it doesn’t feel like fireworks. It feels like breaking into a run. That moment when muscles coil, and suddenly it’s as if there is a hand at your back, propelling you forward. You go from heavy to light in an instant, you’re sprinting, feet barely touching the ground. Everything rushes by and it’s you right there at the centre, flying.
That’s what it feels like.
And then you come crashing back to earth, heavy limbs and hard breath. Everything slows to its usual, unbearable pace, and the loss of that lightness is as painful as a punch. You were free, you were running. And now you are back here on the ground.
I never let Mr Jackson see how sad this loss makes me. How it makes me cry. Every single time.
It isn’t always, only ever, bad. You should see them dancing with each other. The world held in their pressing palms. The way all the little bruises disappear. They fit together so well when they’re dancing. You might even think it is love, when Ruby places her head on his shoulder, when Ash slides his hand to the small of her back.
They have their favourite songs, just like any other couple. Words they mouth to each other, melodies they like to wrap their bodies around.
It isn’t always, only ever, bad. That’s mostly why she had to leave him.
‘So you’re not going back to Gloria’s, then?’
‘Nope. She still thinks I’m at the lake with you,’ I say, holding the phone out from my ear for a second, listening as Tammy takes a dramatic drag of her cigarette, the sound huffing down the line. I can just see her there on her father’s porch, cocooned inside a thick blanket, trying in vain to stay warm, now that her dad has inexplicably banned smoking and drinking inside the cabin.
‘You could quit smoking, too,’ I’d said, when she told me about these new house rules, but she’d laughed her throaty laugh and called me crazy.
‘The fuck I’m supposed to do around here if I can’t smoke or drink, Alice?’
We agreed she had a point.
Tammy knows I’ve been staying with Mr Jackson these past few weeks, has even suggested this was her idea all along, my ‘Get the hell out of Dodge’, as she called it. But, if I didn’t know better, I’d say my sudden foray into rule-breaking has confused her, when this has generally been her domain. I know for sure she has never had any respect for Gloria, even if my mother’s cousin kept me away from the worst parts of the system by taking me in.
‘My mom chose her for a reason,’ I’ve had to explain many times, usually after Gloria had pounded on my bedroom door, yelling at us to shut up, or I’d showed up at Tammy’s house in the middle of the night yet again, because another man didn’t want anyone seeing him come and go from Gloria’s bed.
‘My mom knew Gloria would let me be. It was never going to work with someone … parental.’
‘She could have been nicer though, Alice.’ This is what Tammy always said. ‘It’s not like your mom had just tragically died or anything, hey.’
Tammy, my champion, the first and only real friend I made after I moved in with Gloria.
‘I like your jacket. And sorry about your mom,’ Tam had said, sitting down beside me in the school cafeteria that first time we met. Letting me know, in two short sentences, that she wasn’t going to make a fuss, and I’ve valued her economic version of friendship ever since. I also understand her well enough by now to know she’s not concerned about me lying to Gloria. Just curious as to how I’ve managed to disappear.
(It’s easy, I’ll want to remind her later. If no one notices you’re gone.)
‘Enough about that bitch anyway,’ Tammy says now, as if she’s reading my m
ind. ‘I want to know the juicy stuff. What’s it like with Mr J? Is he as good as we thought he’d be?’
I’ve been drinking a beer during our late afternoon call, and I swish it around in my mouth as I consider the question. I think suddenly—explicitly—of Mr Jackson’s bourbon, how he poured it all over my nipples last night, and the slow way he lapped it up. Telling me nothing had ever tasted so good, and how, when he poured it lower down, the heat and rasp of his tongue set me spinning.
‘Uh. Yeah. It’s … good,’ I manage to say, my face on fire.
‘I fucking knew it!’
Even with our bad reception, I can hear Tammy clapping.
‘Tell me more,’ she starts to say, when I see a car pulling up in the drive. Mr Jackson has come home early today.
‘Sorry, Tam. I gotta go,’ I say quickly, my cheeks still flushed. ‘I’ll tell you every sordid detail soon, I promise.’
Tammy sighs down the phone. This is our first real conversation in weeks.
‘Whatever, jailbait. Just be careful, okay—’
She doesn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. Mr Jackson is already through the door, reaching for me. I hang up the call without saying goodbye, unaware we won’t ever speak again.
Sometimes a person slips out of your life so easily, you wonder if they were ever really there to begin with.
Tammy called me jailbait. Tonight, filming himself slowly moving in and out of me, Mr Jackson said we were equals. That he had met his match, finally. When he was done, when his eyes fluttered backwards and he slumped against my warm body, I had a sense, for the first time, that he might be wrong. Because I felt, in that moment, the slick of him all over my skin, that I might be the powerful one. His needs could be met. He could be satisfied. But I could survive with a great, yawning hunger in my belly. I could make him happy, while my own bones were hollow with grief.
I heard my mother’s voice then, remembered lying next to her in bed when I was maybe eight or nine years old. She had been crying and I’d come into her room, long enough after the front door had slammed shut for me to know it was safe. I crawled up next to her and wrapped my thin, child’s arms around her, and she only let herself cry for another minute before she sniffed, wiped her tears on the sheet, and turned to face me. In the early morning light, her face was beautiful, the way some faces soften when sad, and she kissed my nose.
‘Don’t worry about me, Alice. I was just having a moment. He can go on to hell for all I care. Just another stupid man who thinks he has something over me. That I’ll let him treat me bad because of’—she waved her hand around the room, and I knew she meant this bed, this house, this town belonged to him, and another move was coming.
She railed against the man some more, a guy whose name or circumstances I can no longer remember, and by the time the sun came up, she seemed cured of him, wiped clean of their connection. It was fascinating to watch, how quickly she could put herself back together again.
‘That’s because we’re made of metal,’ she said, when I asked her about it. ‘These men think we’re such delicate flowers. They have no idea how strong we are, Alice. How much we can take. They never doubt we need them more than they need us.’
‘And it’s best,’ she said, some other day, ‘to keep them thinking that way.’
‘Tell me about your mother, Alice.’
Mr Jackson’s head is pressing down on my stomach, he is lying sideways across my body. Though I feel his breath catch with the question, I cannot see the expression on his face as he waits for me to answer him.
Nobody asks me about my mother. Not anymore. When it first happened, I had to talk about her. They made me talk about her, about finding her dead on the kitchen floor. Just to make sure I was okay. As if you could ever be all right after that. But then I moved in with Gloria and boxes were ticked and some other story came along much worse than mine. Soon enough, my story, her story, was no longer something anyone wanted to ask me about. Especially since I refused to share the kind of details people most wanted to hear. I stopped talking about my mother once I realised no one could answer the only question that mattered.
Why did she do it? After all the times she had put herself back together, what made my mom kill herself that day?
I’m silent against the back of Mr Jackson’s head. My fingers stop playing with his hair and hover somewhere unfinished between us.
He doesn’t turn to face me.
‘Tell me about her. Tell me what she was like, Alice. I would really like to know.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
I push him off me, draw my knees up to my bare chest. This is the first time I am the one to put distance between us, and now I wish for a wall.
‘Alice.’
I’m so used to him saying my name. But this is different. There is something so adult in how he says it. Something that reminds me of the man he is to students who don’t look like me. To them, he is an observant, exacting teacher. The kind of teacher who can turn a name into a command. I sense it, and if we were not naked here in his bed, I might have liked to give over to this safer version of Mr Jackson. I might have liked to open up the book of sketches I’m carrying within me, show him all the torn, damaged pages. But I can feel his skin against mine, the radiating heat of him, and I know these are not arms I can wrap around me. Not in the way of men who want to soothe. He does not get to change his role in my life now.
‘I don’t want to talk about her. About … it. I’m over being a charity case.’
‘I don’t think you’re a charity case, Alice.’
‘Sure, you do. Isn’t that why I’m here?’
It comes out harsher than I’d intended, but there’s truth in this accusation, too.
He moves his arm away. Sits up and doesn’t look at me. Just stares straight ahead for the longest time, as if measuring my comment word by word before he responds. When he does speak, his voice has an odd, flat sound to it, as if he is reciting lines from a script.
‘When I was eleven years old, I watched my mother die of cancer. Correction. I watched her dying of cancer. Slowly. For three shitty years. Nobody ever asked me about it. I asked you because someone should have asked me. It would have helped if someone had asked me. I assumed you’d understand this.’
I stare at Mr Jackson’s shoulder, the little muscle twitch that tells me how unprepared he must have been for my response. I want to climb right into what he is saying, I want to know everything, and tell him everything, I feel it all rushing forward in my mouth, but other parts of my body want to back away. To close the conversation down. My heart is jack-hammering; I can feel the pulse in my fingers, and that familiar metal taste in my mouth. It is the taste of my mother’s blood. Nobody knows I stuck my fingers in my mouth after they came to take her dead body away.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t like to talk about it. About her.’
It is the only thing I can think of to say against that flinching shoulder, and the taste of blood on my tongue.
Mr Jackson is still staring ahead. He speaks as if we hardly know each other.
‘That’s fine then, Alice. Have it your way.’
‘Okay.’
Okay.
It clearly isn’t okay, so I turn his head, kiss him hard, instead of asking about that eleven-year-old boy, and what he saw. I am aware my silence is like a hand over his mouth, but I cannot give him what he needs from me tonight. There are ways to lose yourself; there are ways for the body to briefly forget what it knows. Mr Jackson was supposed to be this kind of forgetting, and I want to cling to this version of him for as long as I can.
Thinking back, he probably thinks I never did understand what it meant. To lose the person you loved the most.
When something so large has been said out loud, it sits and waits for you to address it, no matter how hard you work at ignoring it. I once read that a single cloud can weigh as much as a hundred elephants. It’s not something you can see, this weight pressing down, but the heaviness is ther
e, all the same. This is how it is with Mr Jackson and me. I sat for him yesterday, and for the first time I felt he was not seeing me, not really looking at me, as he shifted an arm or leg more carelessly than I’ve gotten used to. I think he might be angry with me, and I’m trying to apologise with my body, because once again I don’t have the words to say how sorry I am. Last night, he was asleep before I came back from the bathroom, or at least he pretended to be, even when I ran a hand down his back, and rested my fingers on his hip bone. I wanted to say, against his back—Tell me. Tell me about your mother. But my own mother danced too close to the surface, set my cheeks on fire. So I removed my hand and, for the first time, we slept back to back.
This morning, I followed him into the shower. I shivered so much, he pulled me into him, wrapped his arms tight around me, and we stood under the stream of hot water together. But he left as soon as we dried ourselves off, said ‘Have a nice day,’ and never told me where he was going. It’s been hours since he left, and I’ve been sitting on the small couch, staring at his crates of books this whole time. I feel inundated with memories, swamped by them. The only thing to do is stay still. No noise, no light. If I concentrate hard enough, I can push the thoughts out, away. It’s dusk now, I’ve made it through the daylight, the jarring bright of it, my flashbacks reduced to skimming stones, darting across the surface of my thoughts. My hand on the door, the yellow of the kitchen, the blood red on the floor, half of that beautiful face missing. No single image stays for long if I remain steady, if I don’t move. I’m still there, staring at the wall, when Mr Jackson finally comes home. He immediately flicks on the lights, making me jump.
‘Alice? Are you okay?’
I try to nod, but instead, the tears come. Fat, crumple-face tears that haven’t been let out in this way since it happened.
‘Where did you go?’ It comes out as a wail. ‘You didn’t tell me. Where did you go and why did you leave me?’
And now I’m sobbing, the paralysis of the day giving over to the exhaustion of holding everything back. He stands there for a moment, watching me cry, then comes to sit down beside me. Arms go around me, and I fold into him.
Before You Knew My Name Page 7