“There is nothing better than this,” he said, and I worried he was right. I worried that once something had entered you, it would never leave—he would plant himself inside me and grow and grow until I was nothing but him. I held on to the sides of his body, and as he came, I heard a tiny push of breath in my ear and we nearly cried.
Mr. Basketball dropped me off at the end of my street and while I sprinted through the dark to my house, the yard felt predatory, but I was full inside. I didn’t even care that I was going to be in trouble. I knew my mother was already home because I knew she didn’t really have it in her to date a blind man; as much as she would have liked to believe her heart was as golden as that of our new neighbor Mrs. Wallaby, who was married to a quadriplegic, we both knew my mother wouldn’t go home with Gary. She didn’t want to be the one who had to drive, or open the door, or boil the tea.
“Your hair is wet, Emily,” my mother shouted as I ran up the stairs. “Why is your hair wet?”
“I liked Gary,” I shouted back, and shut my bedroom door.
After Gary, my mother didn’t go on any more dates. She was back to her bed again. She was almost forty, she complained. She was back to the therapist, a new therapist. Seeing this one two times a week now.
The more my mother saw the therapist, the more sex I had with Mr. Basketball, about three times a week at this point, and during my health class I worried that perhaps it was too much sex, that perhaps tampons would someday be too small for me. I wished somebody would have asked our health teacher Mrs. Blumenthal if something like this was even possible, so I could know if I was being ridiculous or not, but nobody did. Only Leroy Hannah spoke in health, raised his hand to ask Mrs. Blumenthal if vaginitis was the condition of constantly having a vagina, if there was any documented case of a cheerleader getting pregnant while doing a leg kick, and she just shook her head, reminded us that it only took one little sperm to make life bloom inside you; too many girls my age gave birth without even knowing they were pregnant, fetuses drop from our hips like underwear, “and it’s an awful thing,” Mrs. Blumenthal said. “A kind of murder.” Then she passed out a test issued by the government with questions nobody could understand:
Most genital infections are transient, producing no sequelae (True?)
Where do condoms come from? (Trees?)
The female condom can be inserted into the vagina for how long before vaginal intercourse? (Condoms can be female?)
Mr. Basketball and I never had sex with condoms, male or female. We tried, but there was always an excuse; the condom was too far under the bed, or he bought the wrong kinds, or etc., etc., etc. I pressed down on my stomach and it felt harder than usual. How could I have been so stupid? Nobody was this stupid. I sat at my desk and convinced myself I was pregnant. I went to the bathroom, sure that you immediately detected anything foreign inside you, rubbed my hand over my stomach until I felt a giant, hard bulge swell between my hips.
I rubbed my breasts. The flab was tender. But my breasts had been tender since I had gotten breasts. I put my finger to my underwear. It was wet. Janice would have known what this meant, but Janice wouldn’t even look at me anymore. She walked down the hallway with Brittany now and ignored my gaze, the two of them in matching brown boots, the two of them growing out their hair and nibbling on ecstasy pills between class, spreading rumors: Emily Vidal has regular sex with Satan.
I waited at Mr. Basketball’s car after school.
“You can’t wait at my car like this, Emily,” Mr. Basketball said.
“I’m pregnant,” I said.
“Jesus,” he said. “In the car.”
We got in the car.
“You’re not pregnant,” he said.
“How would you know?”
“I’ve only come inside you once,” he said.
“So,” I said, furious. “If you shot me in the head once, I’d still be dead.”
We were silent until Lake Avenue.
“I’m seventeen,” I said. “That’s when my body wants me to have a baby.”
“If you are so concerned take a pregnancy test,” he said. “But you’re not pregnant. Do you know how many times I’ve ejaculated inside a woman and not gotten her pregnant?”
“You’re disgusting,” I said. “That’s a disgusting thing to say.”
“I’m trying to reason with you here,” he said.
At Stop and Shop, he said, “I’d go in with you, but . . .”
“I can walk from here, thanks,” I said, and gave him the finger.
“Emily,” he said. “Please calm down.”
I walked away, determined to hate him forever. In the grocery line, I put a pregnancy test and a stalk of broccoli on the conveyor belt.
“Twelve fifty,” the cashier said.
“I only have ten dollars,” I said.
She removed the stalk of broccoli. “Ten dollars and five cents. I’ll cover the five.”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
I couldn’t wait until I got all the way home to find out if I was pregnant, so I ran through the woods between the two main streets of my town, Lake and Bolt, and squatted behind an oak tree. I urinated on the stick and some splashed on my pants around my ankles and I closed my eyes. “It will be okay,” I repeated to myself, as I waited for the two pink lines to appear. “It will be okay.” Mary or Martha or Katherine or Geneva will be a lovely girl, I thought, nothing at all like myself, she will have long blond hair, and she won’t cry at night, and she will eat tuna sandwiches without complaint, she will read the entire newspaper every morning and she will never date boys who don’t have a GPA of 3.5 or higher, she will wear wool socks and polish her toes and she will emerge from my womb acutely aware of the fact that a female condom is an internal device used to prevent pregnancy and can be inserted in the vagina at least eight hours before vaginal intercourse.
Negative.
I threw the stick to the ground and ran all the way to Mr. Basketball’s apartment.
I arrived breathless. He was behind his screen door, biting on a carrot.
“I’m not pregnant,” I said.
“Come in,” he said, opening the door for me.
His apartment was a tiny condo in a complex next to the commuter parking lot. It was carpeted, brand-new, and bare of anything essential, but at first, this was what I liked about it. I was impressed by the mere idea of having your own home and never feeling compelled to fill up the space. This was a good sign. He was a man who kept only what he needed and that included me. I walked around the apartment thinking, Wow, this is where your microwave could be. Wow, this is where you could have a fruit basket. This is where the light could hit the mirror on your blue walls and make everything feel like the outside.
Mr. Basketball had a slab of beef on the counter. He cut the meat into squares. He was going to make a stew, he said. He was upset. He was throwing chunks of butter into a pot. He sliced carrots on a board. He wanted to know why I behaved the way I did earlier.
“Don’t say ‘behave,’” I said.
He said he understood I was young, he knew that and was ready to deal with that, and I said, “Deal with my youth? Like that’s the problem?” I asked.
“I know this is scary for you,” he said.
He said it was scary for him too. “Don’t you understand that?” he asked. “I’m a part of this. I’m a person.”
I dragged my hand across his chest and unzipped his fly.
“No,” I said.
I put his penis in my mouth, and I could still hear him above saying, “This is scary.” I heard him slide the carrots into the pot. They sizzled. His life hung by a thread when he was around me, and we both knew this. I could be anyone I wanted around him, my good self, my hateful self, my needy and terrible self, and he would love me because at the core, I was a young girl with long brown hair and as I continued to hold him in my mouth, the quieter he became, the better we both felt.
He slid down the kitchen cabinets and took my face in
his hands. “Jesus,” he said. “You are so young.”
He had red wine teeth. I wiped his mouth with my fingers.
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I’m seventeen. In a different century, I would already know how to skin a chicken with my teeth and feed four children off my breasts and have five years left to live.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Are you staying for dinner?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”
We ate at his kitchen table and over the silence of the meal, it occurred to me that even though I’d just held his semen in my mouth—“babies,” I had joked while I inspected the fluid like a scientist—we had never eaten together before. I had never seen him take his knife and fork and cut into his steak, just as he had never seen me drag a carrot across my plate. He was sipping on wine and I was drinking water. I reached out for his wineglass and drank some. This made us both nervous.
“Thanks for dinner,” I said. “You’re a real Batali.”
He smiled.
“You don’t even know who that is, do you?” I asked, imitating the tone he used to ask questions of Lillian Biggs, who never ever knew the answer in English class.
“Fat man,” he said. “White shirt.”
It was official: it didn’t matter what I knew. It didn’t matter if I read the dictionary from front to back or if I could conduct a twenty-minute conversation in Spanish or solve a math problem with three variables. It didn’t matter if I learned how to get my mother to stop crying at night (hand on back, goofy grin on face) or if my legs grew thin, my breasts sturdy and reliable things, my face strong and lean now, my skin tightening at each cheekbone (eat a cheeseburger, my mother kept saying). It didn’t matter if Mr. Basketball and I had sex backward or forward or with my knees at my ears or if I swallowed or spat or put soap on it, it didn’t matter how careful both of us had been never to mention the word “rape”—there would never be one thing I knew that Mr. Basketball didn’t already know. This was why all of our teachers and parents warned us about getting involved with adults; this was why they passed out sexual abuse pamphlets during school assemblies and grown-up women perched on stools and talked about the time that Benny (the uncle) showed his penis to Karen (the ten-year-old) and that when Benny put his privates to Karen’s privates (privates being anything that was normally covered by a bathing suit) it felt good, Karen told all five hundred of us in the auditorium, even though it also felt bad.
“It felt good to my nerve endings,” Karen said, and I couldn’t even open my eyes because I knew that Mr. Basketball was bright red in the front of the auditorium, and that the whole school was staring at me in my seat. “But bad for my heart.”
“Thank you, Karen,” Dr. Killigan said, taking the microphone from her.
Mr. Basketball and I cleaned the dishes, and he put his hand up my shirt. It was soapy. When he kissed me, his tongue was gritty down the side of my neck. When his mouth reached the tips of my fingers, I practiced distancing myself from him, pretended it was just a cat, licking butter off my finger with its tongue.
My father called home to say, “Your mother tells me you need to eat a cheeseburger.”
“Very funny, Dad,” I said.
“Your mother tells me you have a boyfriend,” he said.
“Oh, cut it out, Dad.”
“Is he nice?”
“He’s all right.”
“What’s his name?”
“Daniel.”
“Is he smart?”
“He wants to be the president of the United States.”
“That doesn’t sound very smart.”
“He can be kind of mean.”
“Mean how?”
“He makes fun of fat people,” I said. This was true.
He laughed.
“A lot,” I said.
“Then why is he your boyfriend?” he asked. “You can do better than that.”
* * *
Daniel confessed to me late one night on my couch that he wanted to get to third with me, that he’s been afraid to unbutton my pants out of fear of how I might react. He was sweaty and red and breathless, like this was a confession he had been holding in all summer long. “You make me feel like I can’t or something,” he said. “Well you can’t,” I said.
I discovered jean shorts that summer. “Daisy Dukes,” my mother called them.
Mr. Basketball and I were better during the summers. The sun made us feel like better people. Before I entered my senior year, Mr. Basketball and I slept together on a real bed nearly every day. Mr. Basketball started to ask me if I would call him Jonathan. I was almost eighteen. “No,” I said. We were in his apartment. We lay on his bed and spent too long next to each other, amazed at how normal touching each other felt out of school. We were just like any two people: we laughed and we slept and we loved each other and when we got hungry, our stomachs growled.
“That’s our stomachs saying hello to each other,” Mr. Basketball said.
“I can’t understand what they are saying,” I said.
“They speak Spanish.”
“I didn’t know my stomach was fluent.”
“Oh, they’re just saying hello. No need to be fluent for that.”
But then high school started again and in the hallways, Mr. Basketball would look at me like I was any of the other students, like I was Janice or Martha or Lillian Biggs, and I would go into the bathroom and cry until it hurt.
People graduated, dyed the underside of their hair pink, cut the legs off their jeans, screamed out windows of cars, drank and drank and drank until Marcy Livingstone got pregnant and made everyone feel guilty for it. I sat on my driveway at home, sober and anxious, waiting for Mr. Basketball to bring me to his apartment.
My mother kept a watchful eye. She found me in a skirt on the stoop and bent down to look at me. “Why are you dressed like that?”
“Dressed like what?” I asked.
“Like that,” she said.
“This doesn’t even go above my knees,” I told her.
“It’s not how short it is. It’s how tight it is. Do you want everyone to see the outline of your crotch?”
“Maybe.”
“Since when do you wear skirts?” she asked, and this did not make me angry as much as it saddened me. I was wearing skirts and this made my mother sad because where could she wear her skirt to? That was what she was asking me, and we both knew that she would never ask it like that and I would never answer her the right way.
My mother sat down next to me and lit a cigarette. “A woman wears skirts when she needs to look pretty. I know this, Emily,” she said.
I could not look at her face. I heard the sound of her cigarette leaving her mouth and felt the trail of smoke reach my nose.
“You’re sleeping with that man, aren’t you, Emily? That man who drops you off at the house sometimes?”
I pretended to be offended. “What man?” I asked, standing up. “I don’t know what man you are talking about.”
“I’ll call the police right now,” my mother said, and so I protested as I walked away from her: Mom, please stop it, you are overreacting, you are being embarrassing, who is feeding you this bullshit? I can’t help it if there are men who want to drive me home, and well, who can blame them; she said, Emily, you are beautiful and you need to be aware of that, you need to start being real aware of that.
“Were you not going to pick me up?” I asked when I arrived at Mr. Basketball’s apartment, sweaty and red, my legs chafed between the thighs.
“I was on my way,” he said, sipping on some wine. There was the beagle, Penelope, quietly sleeping in the corner of the room.
“Mr. Basketball,” I said, walking through the door, “your place is a mess.”
“Please, Emily, I told you to call me by my name.”
“Why?”
“Why? It’s my name.”
But I couldn’t. I was afraid to. So I just stopped addressing him. And he was still secretly afraid to see me nake
d during the day even though I was eighteen now and my breasts hung circular from my chest, full at the bottom. He took off my shirt like he was removing a Band-Aid. Then my bra. He turned me around. His stomach was against my back, and he kissed my neck with his mouth. Then my ear, my spine. He watched me drop my skirt, then put me on the bed slowly like I was sick.
I was in awe of Mr. Basketball when we were in school and embarrassed of him out of school, especially in the morning, when his hair was greasy and clumped, early bald spots exposed. His bed was really just an elaborate futon, and he didn’t even have a sheet on it. Just a black comforter and a worn-out pillow, and crumbs sometimes stuck to my legs. He had a poster on the wall celebrating the achievements of Quentin Tarantino and napkins that hung out of the pantry. He had so many TV dinners stocked in his freezer he joked about nuclear fallout to avoid feeling embarrassed. Frozen broccoli, turkey medallions, chicken breast with a mysterious sauce. Orange juice from concentrate. A sock in the utensil drawer. A key chain that said IRELAND and when I asked him why Ireland, he didn’t even know.
“This is where you could put a fruit basket,” I said, pointing to the bare table. “And this is where you could hang curtains. You can choose to block out all this light if you wish.”
“I like my place the way it is, thanks,” he said.
“I’m just saying. You have more choices than you think you do.”
Two weeks before I left for college, he kissed me on the mouth and got out of bed. “I can’t believe you’re leaving me in this shit hole.” He turned on the gas stove and cracked an egg into a bowl. With my eyes closed, the world sounded angry. “What am I supposed to do without you?”
“You’re not making eggs, are you?” I asked sleepily in my white bulky underwear that I only wore at the end of my laundry cycle (“Harriet,” he sometimes called it).
The Adults Page 16