Although I didn’t know how to climax, I never gave up the hope that if I preened obsessively enough I could help him get over his fear of licking and kissing my female parts. Before seeing him, I locked myself in the bathroom for hours with boxes of waxing strips, loofahs and scented soaps. Though shaving the whole thing bare never occurred to me, I scrubbed, inspected, groomed, and powdered until my crotch was cryogenically preserved. I tried a sample, pretending I was him, touching then tasting myself. Seemed okay. A little powdery, but so were doughnuts, and everyone liked doughnuts.
Still, when viewed in a hand mirror the vagina was scary and strange, even to me, its owner. I didn’t look at it too long, for fear it would bite me and I’d get demoralized. One could understand what guys were up against.
But the next time we ended up in the back of his dad’s car, pants unzipped, it was the same thing. He made a move like he was going to go down on me—head lowering into my lap, slowing, stalling—then thinking better of the whole thing.
“I can’t,” he said, not explaining, resorting to his hands while I covered my honesty with pleasing sighs.
I was such a fake.
He dropped me off at home and I watched through the storm door as his taillights receded up and over the hill, stealing my air as they went. I dragged myself up the stairs and cried, churning with doubt. A half hour later the phone, as always, would ring. Alex: saving me. Maybe he knew but couldn’t exactly talk about it. Neither could I.
“Hey!” I said, wiping tears, careful to keep my voice in the acceptable range of Never Happier.
“Hi. Just making sure you’re all right.”
“Yeah, I’m good! How are you?”
“Good.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” I blathered. “Good, I’m glad.”
“I just want you to be happy,” he said. “That’s all that matters.”
“Aw,” I said, and fell back on my bed in a puddle, crying again. I reached out to touch the picture frame, shifting it so I could stare at his smile. I couldn’t wait to see him again and do the whole stupid thing over again.
The next time he showed up at my house, he dismounted his Jeep—looking like Lancelot as usual—and presented me with a CD player and some headphones.
“What’s this?”
“Just listen,” he said. “You gotta hear it.”
I climbed into the passenger seat of the parked Jeep, listening to the music as if my life depended on it. It was “Why” by Annie Lennox. I spot-memorized every lyric, every lovely cadence, wondering if the song had anything to do with the way he felt about me. You could never tell, and Alex didn’t say. He just stood apart, leaning over the back tire, dying for someone to read his mind. I understood the need. It was the same as me pointing my Walkman at heaven, waiting for God’s cryptic FM message for my life.
I pondered “Why” for weeks, never sure what the last line meant. Was it, you don’t know what I fear? Or was it, you don’t know what I feel? Two entirely different endings to our relationship, two completely different diagnoses.
Was trouble brewing? Was a breakup on the horizon?
I thought about giving him my favorite song, Tori Amos’s “Silent All These Years.” But her soothing growl of lucid and fiery female rage was too out of character for the version of me that he knew. Too dark, too dangerously negative. It was safer to focus only on the things that he liked.
Like Rush Limbaugh.
I started tuning in to Rush at noon because I believed he was the one man who understood Alex better than I did. And I wanted Alex to feel like we were on the same wavelength, even if it meant partially destroying my own frequency.
During lunch period I slipped out behind the school to my parked station wagon, sandwich in tow. I strained forward, listening hard through the AM radio buzz. Rush was like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, only he offered no chance at redemption for bleeding hearts like me. Every three sentences or so I got punched in the gut. But hey, a daily political smackdown was definitely better than eating lunch in a locked stall in the girls’ locker room.
“Liberals!” Rush barked. “Liberals and feminazis!”
Sometimes I couldn’t even chew. That was me he was talking about. Liberal, almost synonymous with pedophile. I now understood how dangerous it would be for Alex to discover my socialist-leaning, progressively feminist default settings. Getting punished for them helped. It gave my life purpose, brought us sooo much closer. And compared to the prospect of losing his love, the live burial of my budding identity was something I could learn to live with.
With my right-wing radio routine in full swing, and a subscription to National Review complete, I dove headfirst into library books on how to love, how to be more lovable, more loving, how to get love, how to keep it. There I was, standing in line to check out with my stack of relationship books, when I saw The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf on the New Releases shelf. Its subtitle glowed. I had never read anything like it before: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women.
I left the line, put down my other books and grabbed it, thumbing through the pages until I came to rest on a chapter titled “Sex.” It began:
Religious guilt represses women’s sexuality.
Technically, the female sexual organs are what the older religions feared as “the insatiable cunt.” Capable of multiple orgasm, continual orgasm, a sharp and breathtaking clitoral orgasm, an orgasm seemingly centered in the vagina that is emotionally overwhelming, orgasm from having the breasts stroked, and of endless variations of all those responses combined, women’s capacity for genital pleasure is theoretically inexhaustible.
But women’s prodigious sexual capacity is not being reflected in their current sexual experience.
I looked around wildly, wanting to yell at someone, the librarians maybe. You guys hearing this? It was so nasty. It was so shocking. It was the best news in years.
Is “beauty” really sex? Does a woman’s sexuality correspond to what she looks like? Does she have the right to sexual pleasure and self-esteem because she’s a person, or must she earn that right through “beauty”?
I stood nailed to the ground, squirming a little, as if a finger had been placed directly on the pulse of my own pain, on a cold seed at my core, unable to grow. I turned the book over to stare down the author’s photo. Who are you and what planet do you come from? I had to take her home, claim her as my own, and inspect her further.
So I checked out The Beauty Myth, along with a dozen other books, including a tell-all about what men secretly wanted women to do to their penises. Soon I would be supped full on the best possible way to behave in a million different scenarios, and also a growing sense that I was doing them for all the wrong reasons.
Later that week, I sat on a bank of grass at Alex’s high school baseball game. I didn’t really care if his team lost. I didn’t really care about baseball. I did, however, care a lot about a new technique called the scrotal tug. When I saw him in his tight gray pants, peeling a batting glove off his strong, tan hand, I couldn’t wait to try it on him.
“Good game, guys!” he hollered to his team in his road rage octave. “We’ll get ’em next time!”
Ironically, although he was captain, the other players seemed to brush him off. I knew exactly what their telltale silence meant. It meant shut the hell up. They didn’t like him. It was his senior year, but he was still just a new kid here. If he cared how it looked to be panned, he didn’t let it show. He strode on over to me, smiling.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry you had to come to such a shitty game.”
My hair coiffed to extremes, my mind brimming with wildly opposing dogma, all I could do was proudly plant a kiss on him, then watch him saunter back to his team. No one talked to him. He packed his equipment in silence, and I marveled at the rejection. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who needed a better life.
No wonder he likes me, I realized. He really had no other options.
A couple months later, Alex had to leave.
College for him, the end of life support for me. I’d always known it was coming but hadn’t known what it meant, at least not until I kissed him good-bye at his front door for the last time.
I walked away toward my car, waving the wave of an inmate returning to prison. A few more steps, one last wave—slightly less convincing but still in one piece—got in my car and turned the key. The air drained out and the suffocating upholstery sealed me in, the hermetic windshield mashing my face flat against my empty future. I looked back at Alex one last time, just as his head disappeared and his front door sealed flush with the frame. Our ribbon pulled thin and snapped, and I fell apart.
My foot was on the gas pedal, but I was sobbing so hard I could barely make out the dashboard or the road in my headlights, all of it expecting me to drive home, to accept that I had fallen in love, but the only thing left to prove it now was a picture frame. The life I’d tried so hard to escape would now be resumed in progress. Only minus Rush Limbaugh. Well, at least that was one bright spot. I’d always pine for Alex, but it was time for Rush and his oppressive jowls to evaporate, poof, back into the pall of AM static from whence they came, never to return. Thank God.
At long last, my senior year had arrived, and I marked the occasion by moping. In art class, I stared at our teacher as he sat at his desk, dabbling at a charcoal sketch of Ashley. Year after year, season after season, Avon’s love for her had only grown stronger. Now even the art teacher wanted to immortalize her on canvas, so he could put her lovely mug in the glass art showcase in the main hall, deeming her fit for mass consumption. As if she needed one more fucking reason to feel good about herself.
While Ashley sat in a chair at the front of the room holding her profile in place, the rest of us were assigned to make our own mediocre copies of classic works of art.
We huddled around the bin of prints like hobos at a trash barrel, trying to grab a scrap. I pulled out The Birth of Venus and sat down at the long paint-stained table to consider the goddess and the blissfully entangled cherubim hovering over her head. I looked around at the other students, one badly copying a Michelangelo, another yakking on about chemistry homework while attempting to pencil his Van Gogh. At the front of the room, the teacher, the only talented artist among us, continued to lose himself in the masterpiece that was Ashley. He looked at her the same way Alex had looked at me when I was naked.
I rolled my eyes and rattled a dirty can of used and broken colored pencils, clapping it down hard on the desk. A few people looked up, but no one in this zip code would ever see me.
The class before this had been choir rehearsal, where three other girls and I had taken turns singing a solo from “Panis Angelicus.” As sopranos, the others had no trouble stuffing the rafters with operatic wadge. But when my turn came, I’d done the only thing a mediocre alto could do: imitate Mariah Carey on the verge of a mental breakdown.
At least I had soul, I consoled myself as they snickered.
Outside the art room, a cluster of excited girls in their field hockey skirts passed in the hallway, flaunting the uniform of the chosen few. A headstone of jealousy rose up in my chest, familiar and cold.
There was no way I was going to churn out yet another half-assed second-rate version of someone else’s muse, or spend the rest of the semester passing Ashley’s self-portrait in the hallway. Not this time. I needed some kind of rebuttal. Some kind of spotlight. Something I could call my own.
I squirted some paint on my palette and began to obsess over dabs of acrylic, hunting for the magic combination that would give me the hue of Alex’s eyes, the folds of his striped cotton shirt, the color of his summer skin. I pulled out my dog-eared photograph of him standing beside the Jeep, the canopy of the lush summer forest rising up behind him, golden afternoon luster on everything. Out the art room window, nothing but cold, bare branches.
I pressed Play on my Walkman, so I could listen to Peter Gabriel’s “Blood of Eden” over and over. Never once in my entire school career had I ever dared to skip class or play hooky. As a good girl, I preferred escaping like this, by going out of body via prerecorded music. Up through the roof I went, into a better place, into a magical past where I got to mentally airbrush all the facts. Instead of white and dorky, I’d be black and dreadlocked and powerful, covered in tribal paint, flying high above Avon Mountain, wrapping Alex in my arms, carrying him spellbound into bliss.
The art teacher looked in over my shoulder and grunted.
“You need to fix that,” he said, tapping the skewed angle on her exposed breast, the dark nipple. For a man who loved sketching prom queens, he had a disturbing knack for getting naked boobs just right. Then he added a dab of gray to the craters on the moon.
“Wow,” I marveled, repeating the brushstroke.
“This was due two weeks ago,” he said, frowning and stroking his thick red beard. “But still, it’s wicked.”
“It’s Alex,” I corrected. “And me.”
The art teacher hung it in the showcase in the hall, right next to the charcoal of Ashley, who while always pretty, looked a little boring next to my pair of flying seminude interracial lovers. As I paused in the hallway, taking in my masterpiece, someone stopped beside me. Some kid I hardly talked to.
“That is awesome,” he said, like he meant it. “That’s Avon Mountain, right?”
“Yeah! It is!” I said.
“Hey, is that your tit right there?” he asked, pointing.
“Um, you mean that black girl?” I replied, squirming.
“Totally phallic, that little tower in the background.”
“Hmm,” I sighed, disappointed that I’d somehow missed this tiny, subconsciously painted erection. I should’ve made it bigger.
While the judges at the local art show deemed my philiophallic painting worthy of honorable mention, Alex came home for Christmas.
“I have a basketball game,” I told him on the phone, jumping out of my skin, fixing my ponytail. “I have to be there at six.”
“I can take you,” he offered. “Maybe we can grab a bite?”
I hit the ceiling, running up and down the upstairs hallways of our house, screaming about Alex picking me up.
He looked as well dressed and hot as ever, but even more achingly above my pay grade. He wore a long camel trench coat that made him look like a man. Like Zeus. It hurt a little to look at him.
His family had sold the Jeep, so we drove around in his mom’s sedan, talked about college, fraternities, hazing, blah blah blah. I waited patiently for the only part that mattered: Did he still love me?
“I thought about you,” he said. He thought about me? It was enough. I leaned over to kiss him, seize him; I would have bought him if I could have. I didn’t want to know any more about the stupid details. Just let me own you, my kisses begged. Just for five minutes, my head bobbing in your lap. Please.
It was already dark when he dropped me off at my game. I hopped out in my basketball uniform and waved, crunching over the icy snow into the doors of the gym. Warm-ups had already started. Mallory, my fellow benchie and purveyor of sex tips, dribbled over to sum me up.
“Where you been?” she asked. “You’re late.”
“Alex dropped me off.”
“Ooo, Alex.” She grinned, zooming in. “He’s back, huh.”
“Yeah, he’s back,” I sighed.
“What’s that all over your face?”
I shied back. “What?”
“Oh my God,” she giggled. “What have you been eating? It’s all over.”
“Nothing,” I said, blushing, touching my chin and cheek and feeling something. I ducked into the locker room.
“Hold up,” she said, smiling. “I know what that is. Hold up.”
I ran to the mirror. She followed.
“I know what that is,” she sang. “Ha-ha.” There was a white film all over my face, dried to a crust. I turned on the faucet and dabbed with an industrial paper towel, stupid, stupid, stupid.
“You’ve been sucking di
ck.”
“What? No!” I lied, my pride swirling down into the sink, wondering what it was I got out of Alex other than a whole lot of nothing. Maybe he had used me, but why had I begged him to? I’d painted him into my Botticelli, and he’d sent me off to play second string, with the mark of the Beast all over my face.
12 | The Second Coming, Starring Sonny Crockett
“Thou madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.”
—EZEKIEL 16:17
Growing up, I always had a Harlequin Romance stashed somewhere. But in those books, or at least in the sorry-ass ones I ended up with, it was always the man who had the “climax,” never the woman. Or maybe she did, maybe it just got lost amid all the bodice ripping and face slapping.
The only truly and bluntly dirty book I’d ever gotten my mitts on was Crazy Ladies, a thick paperback I’d dug out of the bottom of the local library’s dollar box. On the cover were four outdated photographs of seminaked women with ’70s hairdos and ample breasts, and stories that would indelibly brand my temporal lobe. For God’s sake, Pursettes stuck in vaginas? What the… midgets with clap toes? Nipple holes cut in bras and clits getting rubbed raw? It was a high-speed train wreck of Naughty, and I practically photocopied each word with my eyeballs. I understood only about one-fifth of what was going on, but I was still devastated when Mom found the book hidden under my bed and confiscated it. I was left to assume that a clit was, I don’t know, maybe a slang word for vagina. Or a French birth defect.
Thankfully, right before my eighteenth birthday, Kate came home from college and helped me cut through the cloud of romantic smog. She, the unwitting activator on the wilting Jheri curl of my well-read but poorly understood sex life.
She was unpacking her bags and sorting stuff in her room, and I was rifling through a box of her pictures from parties, formals, and dates. Life far, far away from our idyllic town looked much, much more ideal.
Until He Comes: A Good Girl's Quest to Get Some Heaven on Earth Page 16