by Sara Taylor
We were sharing his couch late one night after work, were both feeling loose and fuzzy with how much we’d drunk, were nearly to the end of a black-and-white film whose plot I hadn’t been able to follow because all my attention was on him, on what I was going to try and do.
“Hey, Simon?”
“Hm?”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Depends what it is,” he said. “I’m good at romantic advice but bad at all the other kinds.”
“Would you let me suck your dick?”
He blinked, and I immediately regretted asking.
“Alex—” his voice was slow—“I think you’ve got it backwards. The suck-er is the one that’s doing the favor—the suck-ee is the one that usually has to ask for the favor.”
“So that means no, right?” My whole body was on fire from shame.
“Well, I mean, why do you want to?”
“To see what it’s like,” I mumbled. “And, I mean, it’s only my mouth. No other bits get involved so it doesn’t matter. You can pretend it’s someone else doing it—”
He pulled me over against him—I felt the muscles in his arms bunch, felt myself burning hotter—and stopped me mid-sentence with his mouth on mine, with a kiss that made me want to cry.
“Now,” he said in Ina’s voice, syrupy and Southern, “don’t go around treating yourself like some crusty sock, because you’re so much better than that.” Then in his own voice, he said, “Never given head before?” He watched my face, saw how I debated the merits of lying to him. “Or never done any of it before?”
I hid my face in the sofa cushion. “I did it once, a while ago, but it was awful and I want to replace it with a better memory. Of someone, y’know, I like.”
I hoped that he would latch onto the “like” part, but he didn’t, went for the word that I’d hoped he’d ignore.
“What made it awful?” he asked.
He was leaning back into a corner of the sofa, had pulled me so that I was half laying on him, could feel the heat of his body and the play of his muscles, smell the sweetness of cola and rum on his breath and the bitterness of his sweat, feel the way his words rumbled in his chest. His hands were resting on my hips, felt like they were burning my skin through my shirt. And I felt safe and scared, painfully aroused but still so scarred. So, with my face in his shirt so I wouldn’t have to see his reaction, I told him about the first time.
He wouldn’t let me do it, not after I told him why I wanted to, and for a bit I regretted having said anything, having not gone straight for his crotch without a word. But he didn’t seem disgusted with me, and he didn’t throw me out; when I woke up the next morning we were still sprawled like that across the couch, me with my face pillowed on his right pectoral and drooling on his T-shirt, him with his head fallen back on the armrest and snoring, open-mouthed.
I expected him to distance himself after that night. When he woke up he made us breakfast, and when I saw him at Cojones the next day he smiled and waved and flirted with me like nothing had changed. Later I asked if he would let me blow him just because I wanted to. He said no, and he kept saying no for the rest of the time we lived in Reno. But even though he wouldn’t let me, I guess now that it wasn’t because he didn’t want to. He got in the habit of leaning against me, putting his arm around me, kissing my neck in the long slow way that I’d longed for when I watched the teenagers on the beach in Florida, touching me in the warm, tingling ways that people reserve for lovers.
CHAPTER XIX
This was the second Virginian spring that I had to imagine without being there, a full two years since we’d left—which meant that my birthday was drawing close once again. I didn’t mind as much as most people would have that, since leaving home, we’d already let two of them pass without remark: birthdays to me had always meant phone calls to relatives that weren’t sure how old I was (my father’s parents), pretending to like presents from people I had to pretend to like (my father’s brother and sister-in-law) and admitting to myself and my parents that though I had sort-of-friends that I spoke to at school, I didn’t have any friends worth inviting to share the cake that was usually a disappointment in some way. So the lack of notice I quite enjoyed, especially the absence of uncomfortable phone calls. The thing that got to me was that I was another year removed from my father, that much farther from a point that I was increasingly uncertain I would be able to get back to.
It was sometime in March, when I had grown sick of waiting but hadn’t gotten close enough to a time when we might actually be leaving to begin looking forward to packing up and getting out, that I thought again of trying to get in touch with him. I had written a postcard or two to let him know I was all right—without giving the details of what had happened at school and how I was keeping myself busy now that I didn’t have to go—but it didn’t occur to me until then that everything would probably be fine if I just tried phoning him; Ma had never outright told me not to, had even said before we left Florida that she was keeping him informed of our location, so I didn’t have to worry about letting it slip the way I had when we first left home.
For the sake of discretion I went a few blocks over before looking around for a pay phone, just in case it did backfire on me. I dropped in a handful of change and dialed the number, then hung up and dialed again because I’d forgotten that I’d need the area code since I was out of state. There was a bubble of excitement that could have been fear pressing up on my diaphragm, but then came three harsh, ascending tones, and “We’re sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.”
I tapped the cradle button until I got a dial tone, fed more coins in, tried the number again. Same tone, same message. The bubble in my belly had turned to worry. Maybe he had changed his cellphone since we’d been gone; I’d thought it would be the best way to get hold of him, figuring that he’d be at work at that time of day, that day of the week. I hadn’t considered what might happen if he answered while he was at work, that it might be hard for him to hear from me, unexpectedly and after so long. Maybe it was a good thing his number wasn’t working; leaving a message at home would be better.
I counted out my change, fed it in, punched 1-434, and paused: I couldn’t remember our home phone number past the area code. I was stuck, and for a moment I panicked. Then I pressed coin return, held down the cradle button so the call wouldn’t go through, and tapped numbers until my hand remembered the pattern. The relief of remembering was almost as strong as my fear, my excitement, and I promised myself that I would not forget again. As I put in the coins and dialed for real the sensation bubbled under my ribs, and I wondered if he’d changed the answering-machine message, or if it would be the same one we’d always had. I waited for the ring, but instead came the three tones again, and then: “The number you have reached has been changed to a non-published number.” The voice repeated itself while I stood there trying to figure out what the hell the words meant, why it wasn’t ringing, and then the obnoxious “beepbeepbeepbeep” came and I slammed the receiver down.
I wasn’t sure what it meant, other than that I should have thought of calling sooner, should have tried calling sooner, even if I had been too nervous of making my mother angry, of touching off some new conflict between them, of letting slip something or just telling my father where we were and having him come after us. Maybe I had put off calling for so long because I was worried that this would happen. I walked home dejectedly.
When I was younger Ma vanished sometimes for a day or three but rarely more. She never told us beforehand that she was going—I would wake up and her car would be gone, and when the sun rose it saved the dew in the oblong where her blue Honda Civic should have been, and ate that last.
I always thought that, in the moments before I was truly awake, I could sense her absence the way I could sense her eyes on me before I turned around. Now I know it mus
t’ve been that I couldn’t smell her smoke from the porch under my bedroom window, where she stood to have her first cigarette of the day while I slowly woke above her. On the mornings that she ran away I would lay there for a few moments, feeling the portentousness of my mother-tracking sixth sense (breathing in the absence of cigarette smoke), then surrender to the need to actually get up, because a world without mother was a world in which all of the rules were suspended, at least until she came home.
I would come into the kitchen drunk on the intensity of light unsullied, undimmed by the monotony of life, and find my father flipping banana pancakes, boiling a saucepan of coffee, peacefulness cool and heavy over the whole kitchen. We ate in silence as the sunlight flowed through the backyard, over the grass and budding things—we never talked until he’d finished his coffee—and then life began with a snap like an engine starting: sandwiches and water in a knapsack, thick socks under our walking shoes, and out the door before the syrupy rays of sunrise had dripped and diffused into the more mundane pale light of day.
Often we walked into our own wood, that was not our wood but protected national parkland, down to the bottom of our backyard and into the trees, past the graveyard—which my parents could not explain no matter how many times I asked why people were buried behind our house—to the river, to follow its sanded banks, jump from boulder to boulder up the center, feel the rush of water in our blood. Other days we got the bus—a little way, but at that age every moment was so great a fraction of my life that the ride felt eternal. We stopped at the entrances to other stretches of parkland, walked bravely into mountains not our own and followed paths that we had not cut, losing and finding ourselves in a memory of wilderness. And when, exhausted, I fell asleep on his lap on the ride back or in the sun on the stubble of our infrequently cut lawn Dad carried me in, took me through the motions of bath and dinner and sleep, so that I learned how to half suspend the rules, to go out with eyes open and know the long way back.
Where my mother went on those days, I never knew. Her absences could have been planned, to give her breathing space or to give my father and me some time together, but I doubt it. They were like each other and not like each other, wanderers in different ways, speakers of different languages, and though they both felt the desire to share their hidden places, they could not share them with each other.
Maybe they could have worked it out, maybe it was better that they didn’t keep trying, that Ma left when she did. I don’t know if it would have been better if she hadn’t taken me with her: what so irritated her about me were all of my similarities, all of the ways I was my father wrought small. I was her also, but those parts were less glaring: one doesn’t recognize oneself staring out of another’s face.
It was the end of May, a few weeks before schools let out but close enough to summer that they were more or less out of things to teach, when I came home to Ma sorting and tossing and packing us up again. She’d given her two weeks’ notice, was ready to get the hell out of there. The tutor told me that he felt bad making me work because the public school was giving half-days and showing movies, so it wasn’t difficult to get him to sign off on my having completed the year to satisfaction. Ma spent the days before we left lightening our load, bagged up things for me to take to the Salvation Army while she was asleep during the day. The apartment smelled like anticipation.
I went home with Simon after work the night before we left, snugged up to him on his sprung couch and fell asleep watching a movie with my head on his chest like it was any other Saturday night and we’d be seeing each other later in the week. I woke up before him to morning light coming in the windows and wished I didn’t have to go, wished that he and I had gone farther, done more, and at the same time glad that he hadn’t let me. He woke up as I was putting on my shoes, insisted on making me breakfast before I left, kissed me before he’d let me walk out the door.
When I got back to the apartment just after sunrise I felt peaceful in the head but tense as a bowstring in my entire body, ready to travel; started pulling out the backpacks and milk crates and odd duffel to corral what things we were taking with us. The key rattled in the lock just as I finished—Ma coming in from her very last night of tending bar in Reno—and I stopped to scramble together a breakfast for her before getting after the packing. She slept—I knew that it was death to wake her—while I boxed and bagged our mutual and my personal things, carried them quietly down to the car, then spread out on the couch, holding a book but not really reading it, too wound up to concentrate.
She emerged at a bit past three in the afternoon dressed in her traveling clothes more because she didn’t go in for bathrobes than because she was ready to go. She ran a hand through her hair and observed, “You’re wearing my clothes.”
“They’re our clothes,” I answered.
“Are they now?”
“That’s what you used to say when you stole Dad’s shirts.” The shirt of his that I’d been wearing when we left home still got traded back and forth between us; most of the clothing that we owned was technically men’s and fit neither of us especially well. But women’s clothing was less durable and had too much allowance for curves that neither of us had.
“Do I get nothing to call my own?” She meandered to the kitchenette, began to make coffee.
“I haven’t touched your hairbrush.”
“If only you would,” she sighed.
“Or your gun.”
“And I’m hoping you keep it that way.”
She ate the breakfast I’d left for her, went and packed her own small collection of things. It shouldn’t have taken twenty minutes, but she stretched and yawned until one in the afternoon, when she asked me to pop her backpack in the car while she went down to turn in the apartment key. I was waiting with my feet up on the dash and road atlas across my knees when she came back, firmed up some now but still a little sleep blurred around the edges, and as she slid into her seat and popped the ignition she asked, “You ready to learn to drive yet?”
“I’m pretty sure that isn’t legal without a permit,” I answered.
“Pity. We’d get there so much quicker if we were trading back and forth.”
“Get where?”
“California, for now—it depends on how current my information is where exactly we go once we get there. Don’t know how long we’re staying either, so no point asking me.”
My late night and early rise caught up with me as we left Reno. I closed my eyes, just to rest them, as we started west, and didn’t open them again until we hit the city limits of Davis, California. The landscape had changed while I slept, become more familiar not because we were in a place I knew myself, but because we were in a place almost every American knew, the setting of half the movies and television shows I’d ever seen. I’d always suspected that it wasn’t a real place, that people didn’t actually live there, go to school and hold down jobs and get on with their daily lives, but that everything that happened in California happened for the benefit of the gawking nation, that it was a state called TV World and everyone lived on a sound stage.
It was disappointingly normal.
We wound up downtown, in the cute part where it was easier to walk than drive and half the shops sold overpriced food that looked too healthy. It felt much later than it was, still a ways to dinnertime, my body clock thoroughly annoyed with me. We left the car in a parking garage and wandered the convoluted streets, going quick down the straightaways, then stopping to study signs, building numbers. We meandered in that manner for perhaps twenty minutes, skittering fast, then drawing up to look around like quail in a cornfield. I was following, head down and groggy, and nearly walked up Ma’s heels when she suddenly stopped outside of a recessed black door, the stair up to the apartment over the shop on the ground floor, which belonged to a real-estate agent. She stayed still for a moment, reading the listings in the window or the name next to the doorbell, then took my hand and pulled me across the road to the café on the corner. There were table
s on the sidewalk, but she pulled me inside, put me into a two-top against the front window, stepped into the end of the line leading up to the counter and the bright copper-topped espresso machine. I had to admit, Californians looked . . . not prettier, really, but healthier, like they’d been fed good food and beat up less by life than the people I’d grown up around, like they exercised on purpose instead of working themselves into the ground.
Ma sat down on the other side of the table, placed a wide-mouthed mug and a jar of sugar in front of me.
“We’ll get dinner in a bit,” she said. “For now it looks like you could really use this.”
She watched the realtor’s window across the street, sipped her four shots of espresso stretched with water, laughed when I sheepishly pulled an apple, a hard-boiled egg, and a granola bar out of the pockets of my cargo pants.
“I had a friend in school that used to hoard food,” she said, waving away the offered half of the granola bar. “Her mom was a lifetime dieter, all bony by then, but she’d been chubby as a teenager, and didn’t want her daughter to have the same fate. Fat-free everything, no snacking allowed. Except she had a brother, and the mom kept junk food around for him because guys need more calories or something. So she knew there was crap food in the house, and she knew that it was being eaten, but she wasn’t allowed any of it. By the time she got to be seventeen or eighteen she was paranoid of having no food, so she always had carrots and apples and things under her bed, in her closet, in her backpack, but she couldn’t make herself eat them if anyone was watching. Poor girl felt so damn guilty about it, and she was always starving.” She pulled out a cigarette, then slipped it back into the pack, tapped her lighter against the table. “It was almost like she wanted to disappear completely.” She’d been telling her story to the air in front of her face, like she usually did, but then her eyes focussed on me and I felt uncomfortably exposed, my upper lip painted with foamed milk. “I always thought it was weird—you try your hardest to not mess up your kids and that’s how you screw them over for life.”