Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  Like any other party, the kids finished eating my mom’s lasagna in ten minutes, while the adults had only got started gorging themselves. Some of the teenagers played outside, at my basketball goal, and the Brenner twins let themselves into my room and started messing around with my computer. Everyone assumed Ally and I were playing with the others, but actually we went to my mom and dad’s room. My mom already had the door shut, so I knew no one would think anything about me taking her in and shutting the door behind us. I said, “Want to sit on the bed?” And she said, “I don’t care.” So we did. I’d rather have taken her to my own room, to show her this halfway decent picture I’d sketched of the back of her head during church, and maybe get her to pose for me. But, anyway, because I knew the Brenner twins would run to their mom crying if I forced them out of my room, we had to hang out in my parents’ room, with its beige walls, and beige bedspread, and pictures that didn’t jump out at you, like the kind you buy in department stores. At least it was perfectly clean. My room kind of smelled like feet.

  When we sat on the bed, we could see ourselves in the dresser mirror. I’d have laughed at this but she stayed serious, with her face blank, her arms folded in her lap. In the mirror I looked like a freak: my arms and legs had suddenly shot out half a foot that year and my clothes didn’t fit right, no matter how often my mom got me new ones. I had some hair on my face but it grew in a patchy way. Actually, I had patches of hair all over my body in new places, like on my toes and ankles, in other places too. Did I smell like my bedroom? Did she notice how gross I was? A hairy chronic masturbator.

  Because she looked beautiful. She wore a fuzzy white sweater. Her pale hair, which usually hung limp against her head, had static in it, rising up like a halo, and when I put my sweater sleeve against it strands of it stuck to me. She didn’t seem to mind. I put my face close to hers and let my eyes flick over to the mirror to watch it happening. Her smooth pale skin looked brand-new. You could see the little blue veins beneath her eyes. You could imagine all the blood rushing through them while she sat there still. Helga had nothing on Ally sitting on my parents’ bed with static in her hair.

  She leaned away then, just a little (I saw it first in the mirror), and said, “You can’t kiss me for real unless we’re going to get married.” She said it nonchalantly, like she might need to go to the bathroom.

  “You want me to play like we’re married?” She shook her head. “You mean, like, really married?” She nodded. “But people don’t get married just to kiss,” I said.

  “If they want to kiss me, they do.”

  I watched us in the mirror, a snobby-faced girl in a white sweater with static hair. A dark gangly boy in navy-blue wool. I thought of the movie I’d seen on cable last year, about a rich man always trying to impress his cold beautiful wife. Probably it would be like that for us. We’d marry and I’d sell all my nude drawings of her to buy her stables and a Jacuzzi, a big mansion. She’d just roll her eyes. I’d build her a big greenhouse in the yard with every kind of tropical flower in it, from burn-your-eyes orange and blood-red to rich weepy blue, with a bunch of workers tending the flowers, like a little city. A fountain that poured into a pool you could swim in. With fish, if that didn’t gross her out. But her face would stay slack and indifferent. My beautiful frigid wife. Like the man in the movie, I’d keep trying to impress her while she kept being frigid. Secretly she would hate me because I couldn’t stand for her to kiss other men and wouldn’t let her be an actress. Then, just like the woman in the movie, she’d kill me by throwing a plugged-in toaster into our Jacuzzi while I lay in there asleep. “I never liked his drawings,” she’d say on TV, after my death.

  “Okay. I’ll marry you,” I told her.

  “You’re not just saying it to kiss me?”

  “No. I swear.” I leaned my shoulder against hers. “You smell like baby powder.”

  “It’s not baby powder. It’s perfume that smells like baby powder.”

  “That’s stupid.” I said, and was instantly sorry. Ally moved her shoulder away. We looked sadder in the mirror but I would not let the sadness have me. I threw my arms around her and she didn’t fight me. I put my tense lips on her soft calm ones. First I kept my eyes closed but then I opened them for a minute. She must’ve had hers open the whole time—snobby gray eyes wide and unseeing, like a blind person’s. Something was wrong with her, something I couldn’t put to words. I wanted to protect her from it.

  Then I heard a warning sound: the loose floorboard in the hall that creaked when you walked across it. We got off the bed, me yanking her arm in the direction of the master bathroom. The doorknob rattled. When Charlene came in, Ally already sat against the wall, by the tub, not looking worried but simply waiting, like you might wait in a dentist’s office. Maybe she made up plays all the time in her head when she wasn’t acting. But my heart was exploding. I was sweating, looking out from the crack in the door.

  My parents’ room is shaped like an electrical cord socket, a big square that narrowly jutts out on one side, like a prong. My mom and dad’s closets are in the prong part, the bathroom on the opposite side, on the other side of the wall from the dresser. The bathroom’s French doors have little bumpers at the top and bottom so they don’t knock together when they’re closed, which leaves a decent-size gap running between them.

  I saw Charlene from the side, staring at herself in the mirror, because she stood far enough back from it. Most of her disappeared from view, then reappeared holding a dangly pair of my mom’s earrings—frankly, they looked like fishing lures—to her big man ears. Then she sprayed her wrists with my mom’s perfume. She did it weirdly, by spraying the perfume into the air and then running her wrists through it. Then she went over into the walk-in closet. Of course I couldn’t see into the closet; I saw only that she emerged from it in my mom’s holiday dress. The lace pulled around her wide bony shoulders and the part of the dress that went out over my mom’s hips bunched up around Charlene’s long waist. That dress made her look more like a man than the things she usually wore, but she seemed to think it looked great, what with the way she kept smoothing her lap and turning in front of the mirror. She even gave this little laugh. I wanted to stop it right then, come out of the bathroom and tell her how stupid she looked, but it would have felt like walking in on her naked and having a conversation. I couldn’t do it. I just stood there and tried to push her out with my mind. I looked back at Ally: she was messing with her cuticles. Did she even wonder why we were hiding in the bathroom? Did she know that Charlene was a man? The only stuff she ever seemed interested in was the stuff she made up in her head.

  When I looked back, Charlene had already gone back into the closet. She came out in her own miniskirt and silk blouse. She left. It was like a dream. I couldn’t kiss Ally now; I felt sick. I told her we needed to go outside to play with the other kids. “I don’t care,” she said. Outside, I darted away from her. I went into the cluster of magnolias in our backyard and puked up my lasagna all over the dead magnolia leaves. I sat there on the ground until the sickness went away. I found Ally by the basketball goal, sitting with Han, the only Korean girl at our church. She was telling Han that she had a part for her. Something about an affair between a husband and his family’s exchange student. The other kids were running and screaming around our driveway, throwing a basketball back and forth, but she didn’t notice. When the ball bounced right over her head, she didn’t even bother to look up.

  * * *

  “So what’d your mother’s friend die of?” This wasn’t the pretend Archibald, but the real guy speaking to me as I returned my mug to the counter. He looked past me, out the window, where people suddenly filled the streets. They looked like they’d been there all along, strolling by in their scarves and coats. The wind had picked up and lifted the edges of a man’s green scarf. A handful of dead leaves. A woman’s long red hair.

  “She was in this Jacuzzi and her husband threw a toaster in it.”

  “Really?” he said
. I nodded and looked sad. He actually seemed to believe me. He mumbled, “Sorry,” and went back to typing on his laptop.

  * * *

  It couldn’t have been past four, but it looked much later, with the sky turning gray and some of the cars’ headlights flicking on as they rolled down the street. The wind cut right through my jacket. I had sad thoughts: about how Ally had suddenly gotten acne all over, and oily hair, and how her snobby eyes made me feel sorry for her instead of turned on. About how my mom looked so bored when one of the church women came over to have coffee with her like Charlene had, and how she’d sometimes ask the woman the same questions, like “What are the kids up to today?” two or three times without remembering she’d already said it.

  On the sidewalk running back through the green, groups of people in dark clothes strolled by. Probably they’d come from the funeral. Which meant the funeral had ended and my mom had probably started looking for me. I pictured her standing there in front of the church in her puffy coat, glaring and waiting. Maybe about to call the police.

  But as I neared the church—which was lit up now, its windowpanes glowing in the grayness—I saw that she was talking to a group of people at the far side of the building, not even watching for me. Their clothes looked too bright for funeral clothes. Closer, I saw a few animal rights signs lying on the grass, two thin women with huge woven purses, and a guy in a green hoodie. One of the women gestured at my mom.

  “… a symbol of violence,” she was saying to my mom. “How can you wear a symbol of violence and murder and not think about it?”

  My mom had her arms folded around her, hugging herself.

  “It was a gift—”

  “A gift is given freely, not stolen,” the woman said. “Those animals’ lives were stolen.”

  “Do you know how mink fur is processed?” the man cut in. “They shove the minks into little cages, where they can barely move around. They can’t get out of their cages, so they start biting themselves. Farmers try to kill them with hot engine exhaust, but it doesn’t always work. Some of them wake up while they’re being skinned.” He pushed off his hood and stepped closer to my mom, so that his curly hair spilled over his collar. There was less than a foot between them and the clouds of their breath merged into each other. “It’s easy: take it off and take a stand.”

  My mom didn’t even see me. She just stood there holding herself and looking down at the ground like she was waiting for them to go away. I looked around for help, but there was no one there. We were off to the side of the building and if I went around the front, inside the church to get someone, I’d have to leave her alone.

  “It was a gift. If the person who’d given it to me had known…” Her voice trailed off into silence. She fingered the place where the coat cinched at her waist.

  “Be honest with yourself,” he was almost shouting. He leaned forward and waved his hand at her. “There’s no justification for—”

  Then I was in the middle of them, up in his face, shoving him. He was a little shorter than me, but bigger around the chest and shoulders. Still, he went back pretty far and almost lost his balance. He shoved me back, but not hard enough to knock me down. Mom was yelling something but I ignored her and came at him again, my shoulder slamming into his chest, so that even through the padding of clothing and skin I could feel our bones collide. He slipped and fell on the sidewalk, his glasses falling off into the grass, the women instantly kneeling down beside him. “IT’S A GIFT FROM MY MOM’S DEAD BEST FRIEND,” I screamed down at him. “CAN’T YOU TELL SHE JUST CAME FROM A FUNERAL? HER BEST FRIEND IS DEAD.” I couldn’t stop myself. A salty taste filled my mouth, but I didn’t feel like I was crying. Paper rustled beneath my feet. I kept screaming the same words, over and over, until I felt her hand press against my arm.

  “Stop it, Conner. Please stop it,” she said.

  “He was going to hurt you.”

  I looked down at his bent figure, at the paper spread on the grass around him.

  “No. He was trying to make me take one of his flyers.”

  The man looked up at me, his eyes small and blinking. The girls looked at me too. All of their faces showed more shock than anger. The rain had just begun to fall, and the wind rippled through the flyers, their white flashing beneath the light from the streetlamps.

  “See, Conner?” Her eyes caught mine and held them. The wind lifted her hair from her face. “I’m okay now. I’m okay.”

  VULNERABILITY

  Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.

  Women are afraid that men will kill them.

  —MARGARET ATWOOD

  I

  Once I fell for my art dealer. He is a semi-famous gallery owner you might have heard of—the rumor that he discovered his love of art history as a bedridden teenager, recovering from a series of surgeries he won’t specify, is true—and though I can’t say his name here, I’ll add that he’s bearded, green-eyed, and tall, with a pale, nicely shaped head, and aware of whether or not you’re watching his hands as he speaks. I think this is because when he was a teenager he believed no woman would ever desire him, and so even though lots of women like him now, part of him can’t really accept it, and there he is having many brilliant thoughts about art and vision or business or insights into whatever it is you’re telling him about, but all the while he’s also paying attention to whether or not you’re watching his hands.

  As a teenager he read in one of those books socially awkward boys read in hopes of learning to relate to females that this is a sign that one human being desires another.

  But I didn’t know that then, about watching hands. And so I’ll say that ten minutes into knowing him in person, I was. I was. (Though I can’t say how much this had to do with his moving them a lot as he spoke, probably trying to get me to look at them.)

  Sitting across from me in the restaurant where we met, with a very pleased, bright-eyed expression, he announced to me, “You’re looking at my hands.”

  “Well, yes. I guess I am.”

  * * *

  And he kept looking at me like that, in private delight, like something important had happened. I thought he might be crazy. I thought he was possibly the strangest person I’d ever met, and why were the buttons of his shirt unbuttoned so far down his chest? I could see a lot of chest hair (men where I lived in the South didn’t do this with their shirts), and he was wearing, I think, a green shirt with thin pink stripes or a pink shirt with thin green stripes that was a bit too tight (and nothing like the plain white button-downs, no tie, in which he perpetually appeared in articles and interviews for art and culture and business magazines). I wore a pink lace miniskirt that had been designed for a shorter woman and which, when I sat, barely covered the areas that required covering—and he kept looking at me like he was in love with me, his green eyes all wide and bright and wet-looking, as he asked if I masturbated a lot, like most artists did.

  “Do they?”

  I didn’t know many artists. At the evangelical college, those in the arts were steered toward teaching and graphic design and away from being what our department chair contemptuously and dismissively referred to as “the gallery idol.”

  He seemed to take my indirect answer as affirmation and then began to speak of penises in art.

  “I assume you’ve seen Man in Polyester Suit by Robert Mapplethorpe?” he asked. I shook my head. He appeared incredulous. “Where was that Baptist college you went to again?” I told him, and he told me about the photograph of the black man in a suit, the frame cutting off the top of him at chest level, his sizable erection, veins exquisitely illuminated, extending out from the unzipped suit pants.

  “You have to understand that white men feared the black penis,” he told me, as the short, curly-haired waiter delivering our drinks glanced over at me, presumably to see how I was taking this in, and then with a professionally benign expression turned back in the direction from which he’d come. “They were concerned about its effect on women and about the da
nger of sexual madness that might go along with having such a large organ.” He spoke of the field of comparative anatomy in the early 1800s, of scientists fascinated by the sight of African penises preserved in formaldehyde.

  Speaking of formaldehyde, had I ever seen Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living?

  I said I had read about it once in a magazine. I said I hadn’t been to any museums in the UK, or New York for that matter.

  “No museums? You poor thing. What are you doing here with me? You should be at a museum!” Though he sounded pleased with himself, like both of us knew better. His voice had a musical and self-delighted quality, like he was slightly above all this and amused by the fact of himself.

  The gold-flecked green of his eyes glowed liquid and tender with invitation.

  “They’re closed,” I pointed out.

  “I like that—they’re closed. Do you have any idea how you look when you say things?”

  “No.” It struck me as a ridiculous question, comforting in that it made him less intimidating to me in a way. “Do you?”

  * * *

  But he skipped that question to talk about me instead. “There isn’t much emotion showing but there’s definitely from moment to moment an expression of your level of interest. You’re good at looking interested. Is it feigned? If you’re good at seeming to be interested when you aren’t and seeming to not be when you are, you might be good at my job.” He laughed, apparently not expecting an answer. He looked like nothing I said could’ve surprised him anyway, like he couldn’t feel surprise past a certain level (like surprise was nothing more than the feel of the wind against his bald head, ruffling nothing). “But I’m glad you’re an artist. I’m so glad you’re an artist and that I found you and that we’re sitting here now.”