Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  “We can’t stay in here.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s why I said wish.” For no reason I pushed down the headrest on the seat in front of me and it gave a loud click. “You never have any guys in your plays,” I said. “In a real play people have to kiss.”

  “Why?”

  “Haven’t you read Romeo and Juliet? It’s, like, the most famous play ever, and all about kissing. They aren’t supposed to kiss, ’cause their families wouldn’t approve, but they sneak away where no one can see them and, you know—”

  “I saw the movie. It’s okay with me.”

  “What’s okay?”

  “Okay to play it. I’m Juliet and you’re—”

  So I pressed my mouth against hers. She didn’t kiss back but she didn’t move away, either. I just pressed my lips to hers until I got embarrassed for not knowing what to do next (it was my first kiss, except for when my mom made me kiss Aunt Martha on the cheek and she turned her head really quick to make me kiss her lips instead) and then I got out of the car. She followed. She forgot the lotion. Of course Mrs. Kapawski noticed this, and also the fact that we’d come in from the parking lot together. After that, whenever I tried to be alone around Ally at church, Mrs. Kapawski came up and stood beside us. Her standing there made me feel like a creep, so that for a while I stopped hanging around Ally altogether.

  Finally, one Sunday, the solution hit me. I walked over during one of Ally’s plays and asked to join. She shrugged and looked over at her mom standing in front of the building. Mrs. Kapawski was watching, but she didn’t seem to care, I guess because of all the other girls around us. That was how I met Charlene. None of the other adults came out on the lawn—so long as they could see us from the lobby windows they didn’t care what we did—but Charlene just wandered over that day and stood there.

  Ally sat on the grass. In her hand she had an old film canister (probably from the pile of trash in her mother’s car’s floorboard), and pretended to pour pills out of it and lift them toward her mouth. I was the butler. This meant I got to stand close to her and pretend to be in her bedroom alone with her. I was supposed to interrupt her suicide to ask if she wanted tea. “Tea, ma’am?” I said. And Ally made a big show of hurriedly pouring the pills back into the canister. She put her fingers to her temples and grimaced. And then, in a calm polite voice, said, “Of course, Miles.”

  That was the end of it. Charlene applauded, but Ally and the other girls didn’t notice because it wasn’t a real clap. Just Charlene’s two big hands fluttering quietly against each other. She’d come that morning with Mr. Harris, her great-uncle, an old stooped guy who always kept singing hymns a line or two after the rest of the church had finished. During service he’d leaned over and shouted in her ear, “You brought my mints?” She was very tall, all lines and edges, and her face, with its rough skin and crow’s-feet and dark-mooned eyes, looked worn. Kind of haggard. Her leather skirt and stilettos looked flashy compared to the other churchwomen’s clothes, but I figured she dressed like that to make up for her face, like some of the tiny wrinkled old ladies who wore new floral dresses each Sunday, or like the fat women who wore clunky jewelry and embroidered shirts.

  She saw me notice her applauding, and winked. The girls had already started planning another play by the time she loped back toward the building.

  * * *

  So I had the problem of Ally—a girl I loved but could never be alone with—and then, for no reason, I ran into my room one day and tried to hurdle my desk chair. Instead of hurdling it, my legs got tangled in the top of it and I went down and fell on my knee this weird way, so it hurt whenever I bent it and the doctor said I had to sit out the season for soccer.

  Then I didn’t even get to leave the house in the afternoon, unless I went with my mother to the organic foods store or Vitawise, where she got all the chalky green tea and fish oil capsules she made me swallow in the morning. Or hung out with the other homeschooled kids in our network, who were socially retarded, with bad haircuts and board game obsessions. If my mom saw me “just sitting around” she gave me housework, like repapering all the drawers in the kitchen even though the old paper looked fine, and mixing vinegary homemade cleaning agents (which at least counted toward my chemistry requirement). Sometimes, if my dad stayed at work late, I just sat in the bathroom, on the rug, squishing bath beads over the shower drain and smelling the lavender. She hated me yelling stuff out about bodily functions—which I did if she came knocking—so she usually left me alone. I started hiding Helga in the guest towels and spending a lot of time there. For any amount of time I could study her body, white against the black. The weight of her breast against her hand. Her half drawn and vanishing into the white of the paper. She looked more real than real life. Always alone but also not alone, because the pictures were so full of want. Sometimes I didn’t know where Wyeth’s want ended and mine began.

  Then, one night, I walked by my mom and dad’s bedroom and heard my father tell my mother, “For so long, I’ve thought, I’ll go through the motions and the faith will return.” Pause. “But I don’t feel anything, Carol.” Then my mother said, “Conner is probably still up, Mike,” and they lowered their voices. Just the evening before, he’d led a prayer at church, and I wondered if the prayer still counted for the rest of us if it didn’t count for him.

  Next thing I knew, my dad was gone all the time helping poor people get their electricity turned back on, or visiting people in the hospital, or working at the soup kitchen downtown. Which you’d think would be the opposite kind of behavior of someone who didn’t feel anything about God. Half the time he came home after Mom and I had eaten dinner, and she had to warm his plate. If I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom I found him asleep in front of the TV.

  Around that time Charlene showed up. The more my dad stayed out, the more she started coming over. At least when she came over my mom forgot about bothering me. Sometimes, from the kitchen, I watched them sitting there on the couch. Mostly they talked on and on, but once I found them just sitting there in silence, staring straight ahead, the afternoon light from the window flecking the mugs in their hands and their laps with gold. I didn’t get the point of them sitting quiet like that. They might as well have been alone.

  * * *

  It pissed me off that she thought she was wise. It’s okay, June. It’s just an assertion of his masculinity. Your husband isn’t avoiding you. He’s avoiding himself. No, I don’t think you should get layers; your hair is too fine-textured. When she first came to the house for coffee with my mom, I lay by the fireplace with my drawing board propped against the ledge there. She knelt down and said, “What are you drawing?” in a voice that reminded me of sandpaper. She wore a short plaid skirt that made her legs look too long, and a shiny blouse that rustled a little when she moved her arm.

  I told her I wasn’t drawing anything particular. Just moving my pencil around to see what happened. This seemed to make her happy.

  “I do that too. I love to draw all the time.” She brushed some of the stiff blond curls from her cheek the way normal women do. “But you know most people stop when they get older. So it’s important you continue to draw.”

  “For how long?” I’d gotten her point; I just wanted to be a smart-ass.

  “Well. As long as you live.”

  “What if my hands get mangled in an accident?”

  She looked at me in this concerned way, like I might have mental problems. The negative effects of homeschooling.

  Then Mom called her over into the dining room, where they had coffee and talked about how they were both reading the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. They said what a coincidence this was, as the book had been out for “quite some time,” and they’d both started reading it on practically the same day. See, my mother read biographies all the time, and apparently Charlene did too (though you’d think someone like her would have more exciting things to do, like go to trans bars).

  “Can you believe this part about h
er taking his material?” Mom said, putting finger quotes over “taking.”

  “As if a shared experience could belong more to one person than another,” said Charlene, grinning. “It’s an adolescent viewpoint.”

  “But I understand the financial aspect of the situation. In a way, his viewpoint was worth more than hers.”

  “But I don’t think it was about the money, June. No one wants to see his subject walk over to the easel and take up the paints, if you know what I mean.”

  Mom got all moon-eyed at this, like she thought Charlene spit diamonds. I thought I might throw up.

  Then they started talking about their diaries. They called themselves “diarists.”

  “I’ve never met another true diarist,” my mother said.

  First I thought, WHAT IN THE WORLD did my mother have to put in a diary? All she did was give me assignments, wander around the house wiping things down, drink green tea, and go to stores. She never said anything to me about a diary; then Charlene’s here thirty minutes and my mom is Anne Frank.

  The next time Charlene came and brought Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Before she put the DVD in the player, my mother said, “This is my favorite movie.” She’d never mentioned this before either. While they watched the movie and held their little bowls of popcorn I rifled through my mother’s bedside drawer and found the diary. It was a suede-covered book with unlined pages. Scared of what I might find, but also crazy with curiosity, I scanned the pages as fast as I could. But it didn’t say anything. Just her schedule. Walked this morning. Road wet from last night’s rain. Conner continuing to struggle with geometry. Mike at soup kitchen again after work. Salmon and almond rice for dinner. Phoned Aunt Martha. Finished Jimmy Carter book.

  It went on like that for a bunch of pages. The most boring diary you could imagine. But then I saw her start saying C. instead of Conner. Then I realized C. didn’t stand for Conner.

  … Had tea with C.…

  … Read the Hughes biography with C.…

  For her latest entry, she hadn’t written her schedule. She wrote only: C. says that to accept your own malleability is the beginning of faith.

  There was nothing about me that day. Not even Dad. She’d kept up with our stupid schedules for months and months, and then stopped, just to put in some of Charlene’s bullshit.

  It made me so mad I started shaking. I slammed it back in the drawer the wrong side up (which is probably why she ended up moving it somewhere else), and went to my room to find a clean notebook. I would start my own diary and not mention her once. Snobby gray eyes, I wrote. Crossed out. Then, I hate Charlene. Then shit twice. I couldn’t stand it. Suddenly I hated the whole idea of diaries and ripped up the page into tiny little pieces.

  In the living room, they’d finished the movie. Charlene had my board with the sketch paper in her lap. She was showing off, drawing my mother. My mother sat very still and looked past Charlene, while Charlene’s eyes flicked over her face, down at the page, over her face again. She had big long hands and made short rapid strokes and I wondered what it would feel like to draw a person like that, like your hand knew without a doubt what to do. I walked past them without saying anything, and as discreetly as possible glanced over to see my mother on the page, her slender nose and Chinese eyes and bangs falling over her forehead. Charlene’s big hand, with its French manicure, danced all over the page, all over my mom’s face. I went on into the kitchen. In the kitchen I drank really fast from a can of root beer. Passing back through the living room, I let out a great loud burp. Both of them stared at me. My mom glared but I pretended not to notice as I walked right through. “You’re no Helga,” I wanted to shout at her. But then I’d have had to explain myself.

  * * *

  How did I figure out Charlene was a man? It just hit me—that’s the funny thing. One day I saw her at our dining room table sipping her coffee in the little china cups my mom set out for them, and maybe the light hit her wrong, or maybe she put her makeup on in a rush that day, or maybe it had to do with her sandpapery laugh or the way she touched my mother’s wrist when they talked about their book.

  “She’s a man, isn’t she? Like a drag queen?” I asked my mom that evening. We did, after all, have cable television.

  My father cleared his throat. “Well, not exactly,” he began. Though he didn’t see Charlene much, as she usually came in the late afternoon when he volunteered at places, I could tell he didn’t warm up to her like he warmed up to most people, patting their shoulders and grinning with his eyes lit up. “Well—” he started again. You never noticed how big he was until he started getting flustered and messing with his facial hair. “She’s in a transitional phase. Technically she’s—”

  My mom cut in, “You’re not to say anything like that around her, Conner. Understand?”

  “I’m not an IDIOT. I know you don’t go up to some man dressed like a woman and ask, ARE YOU A MAN? EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT.” She flinched, and I lowered my voice. “I just want to know if she’s a man.”

  “Yes,” Dad said. “Don’t raise your voice at your mother.” He looked down and picked at his beard. We ate in silence like that for about five minutes, and then everyone began talking like normal again, each describing our boring days.

  * * *

  If my mom knew what Charlene had done in her room—hold her earrings up to her ears, spray her perfume on her wrist, emerge from her closet wearing the lacy black dress she wore to holiday parties, and then gone back to the dining room like nothing had happened—would my mother be sitting in the church now, carrying around that stupid coat? Would I be standing in a strange town freezing my ass off? I’d thought about telling her a thousand times but the thought of saying the words made it seem more real, less like a bad dream.

  The more I thought about it, the more impatient I got waiting for Charlene’s funeral to end. I decided to take a walk. I went down the steps and back onto the sidewalk. The animal rights people were still there, but farther down the green, sitting on blankets while some guy paced and lectured. A couple of college-age kids were on a park bench on the other side of the sidewalk, making out. But when the woman brought her face away from the man’s you could see they must have been almost sixty, just dressed like college kids with faded jeans and Birkenstocks clogs and J.Crew sweaters. At the end of the sidewalk, the main road. Buildings with columns and arches that looked hundreds of years old and nothing like the vinyl shacks that popped up overnight in my town. Across the street I saw a string of shops with brick walls. A café. I wanted to go in the café and buy a frappuccino but didn’t know if I had time. Probably my mom would get pissed if she came out of the funeral and didn’t see me, but so what?

  * * *

  When I opened the door to the coffee shop the warm air and smell of fried things made me feel sick, like someone breathing through his mouth in my face. The coffee shop wasn’t the kind of place that sold frappuccinos and had bands and poetry readings, but rather like an old person’s coffee shop, where people ate bacon. A foreign-looking middle-aged man sat on a stool behind the counter with a laptop computer. I fake-coughed so he’d look up.

  “Yes?” He didn’t have an accent, which disappointed me. I asked him for a frappuccino, just to see if they had them after all. They didn’t, so I asked for a plain coffee.

  “It’ll stunt your growth.” He laughed hard; I was already six-one.

  “I’ll chance it.” It sounded like a pretty good comeback to me.

  “Who died?” he said, raising his bushy eyebrows at my black blazer. He poured the coffee into a white mug that needed to go through the dishwasher again.

  “My mom’s friend Charlene. She was a guy who wanted to be a woman. Probably his name was Charles before he started dressing like a woman.”

  The man frowned. “What?” I’d offered too much information too soon. The negative effects of homeschooling.

  “Never mind. How come nobody else is here?”

  The man shrugged his shoulders.

&n
bsp; Windows made up one whole wall of the place, so I sat by that wall, facing the street. Cars zipped up and down the street, but there were no actual bodies—no one on either side of the sidewalk. It was like me and the coffee shop man were entirely alone in the world. For a minute I imagined this scenario where we really had gotten separated from the rest of the world and could only communicate with it through the Internet on his laptop. He made me cook and clean the restaurant in exchange for Internet time.

  He kept typing on his laptop, not looking up. He hadn’t charged me for the coffee. In my head I named him Archibald, and in my head we conversed. “You have a secret, don’t you?” Archibald said. I told him about Charlene in my mother’s room. Archibald was appalled. He rubbed his tan forehead and slammed down the screen of the laptop. “But why haven’t you told your mother all this time?” Archibald said. I drank some burnt coffee from my dirty mug and got reflective. I lit a clove even though I knew it wasn’t allowed. Archibald didn’t tell me to stop. It was really hot in the restaurant but my wet underarms definitely needed the cover of my jacket. It’s complicated, I told him. I started explaining about the dinner party my mom had had before Charlene left.

  A lot of families from church came, including the Kapawskis and Charlene. It was only a month after I’d kissed Ally and acted in her play, and when I saw her walk through the door in this fuzzy white sweater I had to look away to make my heart stop rushing. Charlene came in behind her, wearing the fur coat my mother would three weeks later come in wearing, saying Charlene had to move for a job. (“What job?” I asked Mom then. But she changed the subject.) Mom and Mrs. Kapawski made a big deal over the coat, oohing and ahhing. They rubbed the fur on Charlene’s arm. “Is this real mink?” And blah blahh blah. Charlene: “My mother bought me this coat before she died. It’s my favorite. It’s just getting cold enough to wear it,” blah blah blah. In my head I got a picture of this shriveled old lady in a low-lit room smelling of death, in bed hugging a big wrapped box. “Go on, be a woman. I’m okay with it now,” she said, and passed the box to Charlene.