Little Cat

by Tamara Faith Berger

  Those were Adi’s kids, I knew.

  Gio put his arm around the girl’s shoulders and they started walking up the hill. The boy followed, but he was looking back at me. Like water, love clings when you hold it loosely. Like water, love goes when you grip it too hard. But truth wanders on and on and on …

  ‘Daddy, can I have that?’ I heard the girl say.

  My bloody beanbag pillow was on the sand.

  ‘No. Leave it. It’s dirty.’

  ‘But that was Mommy’s special pillow!’

  ‘I said to leave it.’

  ‘Why is there blood on it?’

  ‘Leave it!’

  Gio slapped the back of the girl’s head. She let out a yelp and she left it alone. The pillow was like an organ on the ground.

  I watched them walk up toward the house. The boy picked up stones from the driveway and threw them back at me. Gio put his arms around both his children and ushered them inside.

  I walked out of the water and got my clothes from the car. I shoved my T-shirt into my underwear. Then I crashed down in a small patch of sand. I hugged Adi’s pillow between my legs.

  The sun hit my throat. I was bloody. Why was I alone? Is this what happens to amoral Jews?

  Ezrah, everyone’s path is from pure to disgusting. There’s some moment that wrenches our nice things away. There are only a few years in our lives when our mothers will keep cleaning us, there are only a few years before our mothers put us down. But still we want to get picked up and thrown in the air! Our mothers say no and our fathers say no. They say children have to walk and learn to clean themselves. So how do we learn to clean ourselves? How can we love each other when we are so filthy?

  Ezrah, this is about a secret. You still loved me, I’m telling you, when I was fifteen, when I was out every night with Michael and John. When I was silent, constipated, stuffed up with rags. You still loved me, even though you didn’t know it. You were always so smart. You never got in trouble. You told your parents lies when you drank with your friends, when you drove their car blasted out of your brain. They still bought you your own car when you were eighteen, they still paid for your school, they still thought you were good. Yeah, you’ve always been so smooth. Your lies and my lies should be the same. But I guess what happens when we grow up is that some of us swelter and pour forth the goods and some of us freeze and dive into the cracks. I’m female, right? I went into myself.

  You know, I saw this couple the other day walking hand in hand on the street and I knew exactly how they had sex. It’s my talent, Ezrah, I have X-ray vision. I can see how people fuck. And I saw that these two fucked so well, even in hatred, because she was the lock and he was the key. It sounds stupid, I know, but it really works like that! Cunts and cocks have to fit – if they don’t then they’re doomed. You know how people fuck when they’re in love? They each give up their sex for the other. They say: You have my pussy, you take my clit. And: You take my balls, you take my cock. One lover volunteers to be neutered if the other lover can be doubled with sex – full of the power of the pussy and the dick!

  Yeah, real lovers are magnets, not attracted to shit. Shit makes you tired. Shit really smells. Fucking’s for parasites who feed off shit! I clean the shit, you understand, Ezrah? It’s a compulsion I have. I’m confessing my compulsion to deal with shit. The shit in the well, at the bottom of the well, the shit in the cold pool and the shit in the creek …

  Listen to me. What I’m saying is this: fear is my realm. I’m waiting for fear. Because before anyone comes in, from the moment I’m wet, fear’s stooped beside me, it’s inside my gut. When I’m with a strange man, I’m waiting for fear. It feels really good to meet with this fear.

  I heard Gio’s steps crackling down the path. The sun was almost down. I waited until his body cast a shadow over mine.

  ‘We have to go now,’ he said.

  Gio leaned down and tapped my head. The ends of my hair were still wet, all sticking together. Gio took my hand and helped me stand up. He walked over to his car. He motioned for me to follow – Come on, girl, come here. Good girl. I stood there and looked up toward the house. It still looked like a church. Gio had already started the car. I picked up Adi’s bloodied pillow from the ground. I climbed into the car beside him. The muscles on the backs of my legs started spasming. We pulled out of the driveway. I thought I saw the kids waving from the porch.

  At first we drove down a narrow mud path. Branches scraped the sides of the windows. We turned left onto an empty paved street before we got back, too soon, to the highway.

  I opened my window to get some fresh air. Why the fuck was Gio acting like everything was okay?

  ‘Roll up your window, please.’

  ‘No. I need air.’

  ‘Roll up the window, I said.’

  I did it so hard I though the crank would crank off.

  ‘Is this why Adi left you? She couldn’t take how you spoke?’

  Gio cleared his throat. He was mad. I leaned my head into the glass.

  ‘When did you become a whore, Mira?’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, Gio. I was twelve years old. On the cusp of womanhood.’

  I started laughing. Then I stopped. It occurred to me, some girls really have to do this at twelve …

  Gio looked at me like he could taste my guilt. It was the first time that I saw all his teeth. They gleamed like bluish pieces of snow.

  ‘All great whores become pure,’ Gio said. ‘Even the foam on her lips becomes pure.’

  The air in the car was bacterial, unbearable.

  ‘Mira, do you know how a whore becomes pure?’

  She swallows buckets of come? She fucks up the ass? I wanted to say that and burst out laughing again.

  ‘Mira, my God, in the name of our God, Adonai, for whose sake you have wasted your flesh this way – you can’t hide who you are or where you came from, or when and how you came to be in this place. You are a Jew like the great whore of Babylon. The woman is Sodom, she is Egypt, she is the River of Blood.’

  ‘I know! Oh my god! And you just fucked the Jewishest River of Blood on the way here at the side of the road, right? Am I not right? Jesus, Gio. What the fuck is your trip?’

  Gio started to drive insanely fast.

  ‘Mary of Egypt was only twelve years old, like you, when she left her parents to travel with a man. And once she did this, she kept on travelling, alone, city after city, to let all the other men take her the same way. Mary did this out of insatiable desire. She wanted to wallow in the trough, Mira. That, to her, was life.’

  ‘I had sex the first time at fifteen with a scumbag named John,’ I said. ‘He and his uncle used to film me wallowing too … ’

  ‘One day, when Mary was walking at night, she saw a great crowd of men, Egyptians and Libyans, going down to the sea. She stopped one of them and asked where they were going. “We are all going to Jerusalem for the exaltation of the Holy Cross,” they told her. “Do you think they would take me, if I wanted to go?” Mary asked. “Anyone who has the fare can go,” the man replied. “Indeed, Brother,” Mary said, “I have neither the fare nor any food, but I will go and get into one of the ships and they will take me even if they do not want to. I have a body that will serve as both fare and food for me!” Mary wanted to go, you see, Mira, so that she might experience more lovers, so that crowds of men could watch her.’

  ‘Once a carload of guys drove by me. They were hooting at me, late at night on the street. All men think that a woman walking alone at night is a whore.’

  ‘Mira.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Do you know how to repent?’

  A grunt.

  ‘Tell me how you will repent.’

  ‘Fuck till I’m sore.’

  Gio ground his teeth together like Adi used to grind her teeth together. ‘You must learn how to repent,’ he said.

  I let out another grunt plus a snort. ‘Jews wander on and on a
nd on … ’

  ‘Think about where your mouth has been. Think about where your hands have been, your open legs. Don’t you know what you have absorbed? You have sucked men’s sinning, their filth, Mira, right up inside you. These guys have sex with you. They watch you. They watch how you move. They do not think good thoughts about you, Mira.’

  ‘That’s not true! They do. I know they do.’

  ‘No. The whore is the woman he beats out of his body.’

  I remembered Ezrah in his car with me when I first told him what I was doing, Ezrah in the car with me outside the temple during Yom Kippur, slamming the door. When he left me alone I pulled the shawl I was wearing up over my head and I covered my face. I slid my hand under my dress, into my underwear, and I lifted my leg. I stuck a finger inside my ass. The first time I ever felt there. A dark, tight, unloved inside.

  This was how I atoned for our sins.

  ‘I knew it was from the very first time you came near me,’ Gio said. ‘You are an open furnace, able to feel anything. I’m telling you this for a reason.’

  My throat constricted. I put my hands over my eyes.

  ‘If you repent for your sins, Adonai will take you back. God promised the whore His undying love. God sings to the whore His saddest love song. “And I will betroth thee unto me forever,” He sings, “I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness.” I am telling you, Mira, that there are whores who have been wandering in the desert for thirty years. They are the ones who truly know the Lord, our God, Adonai … ’

  I took my hands from my eyes and looked out the window. God was not watching. He was not watching as I fucked!

  We were back on the busy part of the highway, speeding by gas stops, bright cubes selling food.

  ‘After having sex with as many men as she could on the boat, Mary finally made it to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Cross.’

  I wanted to blow this car up and die in the fire.

  ‘But she found that the church would not let her in. She tried to go in with the swell of the crowd, but as soon as she set foot at the threshold of the church, something repelled her, Mira, some kind of force.’ Gio paused. He kept checking on me. ‘Mary suffered this way five or six times, watching all the other people enter the building easily. And yet she could not go. There was some kind of force field repelling her. She felt it all over her body, inside herself too. Eventually, Mary gave up and stood in a corner of the court. And just when she gave up … ’ Gio paused again. He enunciated every word. ‘Mary knew it was the conscience of her uncontrollable lust that prevented her from going inside the church.’

  I was leaking through the T-shirt in my underwear, sitting in blood on his white car seat.

  ‘Mary needed the Mother of God. She wept and grieved and beat her breast. “Help me,” she prayed to the Mother of God. “It is not a man that I need anymore!” She got down on her knees and this is what she prayed: “Virgin and Lady who gave birth to the Word, I see that it is not suitable or decent for me, defiled as I am, to look upon you, you who always kept your body and soul clean. It would be right for you in your purity to reject and loathe my impurity … ”’

  Gio was making his voice high and girlish.

  ‘“But help me, please,’’ he continued, ‘‘for I am alone. Receive my confession, woman to woman, and let me enter the church. Do not deprive me of the sight of that most precious wood upon which was fixed God-made-man whom you carried and bore as a Virgin!”’

  I started laughing at Gio’s performance as the whore. I sat through the rest of it, hating him.

  ‘“Oh Lady, let the doors be open to me so that I may adore the divine cross! He showed us how to die to the world – how to die in our heads, not in our bodies; how to let ourselves die by burying ourselves in horror, to die to the world but to rise and live again. I beg you, Mother, from whom God became flesh, to guarantee my promise and I will never again defile my flesh by immersing myself in horrifying lusts!“’

  ‘My lusts are not horrific,’ I said.

  God, I am not religious. God, let my vagina melt into the seat. God, let my two feet descend to the highway, through sudden holes in the floor of this car. Let me make sparks with my flesh on concrete.

  ‘I can feel every cock that has ever been inside me.’

  Buildings grew up ahead. We were back in the city, back near the club.

  ‘When she promised to never again defile herself,’ Gio said, in his normal voice, ‘Mary was finally let into the church. Mary was ready to be led to salvation. The voice of the Mother of God came to her and said, “Cross the river Jordan and there you will find rest.”’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  ‘When I met her, Mira, Adi had already been wandering for years. She was a naked girl with no hair on her vagina who had not eaten for years.’

  I was swallowing, fighting the vomit back down. I closed my eyes to shut up my throat.

  Gio’s whole body was shaking strangely. I wanted to curl far away from him. I had the bloody pillow behind my back. I took it and hugged it: Mommy’s special pillow.

  God, get me out of this fucking white car. Get me to a toilet quick.

  ‘Jesus said that we must bring forth what is within us or else it will destroy us.’

  ‘But I’ve welcomed every cock, every dirty, hot and cursed one.’

  ‘We must bring forth what is inside us … ’

  I felt myself smiling, my lips shut with shame.

  ‘We must bring forth what is inside us, Mira … ’

  ‘We must bring forth what is inside us, Mira … ’ I mimicked.

  ‘Or else it will destroy us.’

  ‘Or else it will destroy us.’

  Stopped at some tracks with my eyes flashing red, I took Adi’s pillow and opened the car door. Gio didn’t stop me. I stepped out bleeding and slammed the fucking door hard. Gio waited for the lights to turn green. He drove over the tracks. I walked on water.

  VIGOUR

  I spat on the gravel. I was limping, bloody, heading toward the park, thinking what made me be with a strange older guy for my very first time and then never say a word? I spit on the gravel. What made me be some freakish escapee like Mary, Gio’s twelve-year-old whore? I lurched toward the lights. I could still hear his white car squealing away. Gio had flipped some kind of switch in my chest that made me horny for him while he hated me! I worshipped his body without my consent.

  Fuck, what made me think that I could handle grown men, fucked-up ones like Gio and John, and then just reject them, X them out of my life? Why didn’t I call the police?

  I could not handle a man or a woman. I could not be trusted with anything.

  I had actually seen John again – he’d come to the club one night about a month ago with Michael, just before Adi left. I was totally freaked out when I saw them at first because it had been almost four years and I had no fucking idea how they knew I was there. I mean, they didn’t know I was there, but I was scared when they saw me they might want me back. I wanted to get high when I saw them, fucked up and high. Adi told me, though, to go over and surprise them. Fuck them, she said. Fuck what happened, past is past. Go, Mira, go be a mirror to them!

  Adi was braver than me, she was always braver than me.

  From the black-lit side of the room, I could see that Michael was sick. I mean, he was green, and his clothes were practically falling off him. I thought: He has AIDS. John looked like some kind of gorilla beside him.

  They were drinking beer and chain-smoking. John was overexcited, eyeing all the writhing things.

  ‘So, it’s fifty a song, big boy,’ I said, leaning on their table, my tits in John’s face. I felt like a businessman mirror.

  John immediately pulled away like he was scared of me. I started laughing at the expression on his face. I couldn’t help it. He looked like someone had just sliced off his fingertip or something. He was swallowing and swall
owing, pushing his chin into his throat.

  Michael started laughing like me. ‘You still watch the Mira tapes every week, don’t you, Johnny?’

  It was like John couldn’t take the sight of me so close to him. He kept retreating his head like a turtle does. I had on my pink cut-off T-shirt, the one that was so short you could see the bottoms of my tits. I was standing above John with my hands on my hips.

  Me and Michael seriously couldn’t stop laughing. Michael’s eyes were the same, but everything else on his skull was shrunken.

  ‘What’s going on with you?’ I asked.

  Michael coughed so hard he had to put out his cigarette.

  ‘Nothing,’ he finally got out.

  ‘You look like a ghost,’ I said. Then quickly added, ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, Mira, it’s you that looks like shit.’ John was angry. He lit another cigarette.

  ‘Shut up, Johnny,’ Michael snapped. ‘Mira looks hot. You look a fuck of a lot hotter as a lady, Mirabella.’

  ‘Just get rid of those tapes already, will you?’ I yelled at John, feeling half-embarrassed, half-proud from what Michael had just said. ‘I’m not your fucking eternal release.’

  John nodded. He closed his eyes. Michael crack-toothed smiled at me. Lights flashed over his face, red and green.

  ‘Our Lady,’ Michael said, suddenly sitting up tall and looking around the club. ‘If I were to put on a play in which women had roles, I would insist that these roles be performed by adolescent boys and I would so inform the audience by means of a placard, which would remain nailed to the right or left of the sets throughout the performance.’

  I leaned down toward Michael and put my lips on his temple.

  ‘Our Lady,’ I whispered. Michael’s blood beat visibly there. He nodded and chewed on his bottom lip. ‘It’s really okay,’ I said. ‘Our good wishes are furtive and whispered, as, among others, those of proud servants and lepers must be.’

  I turned to John, but he still wouldn’t look at me. He was sucking so hard on his cigarette that the filter got wrinkled.