by Paula Bomer
“What do you have on draft?” a man said, and Lola stood up right away, as if she were in the military and he’d just barked an order.
He sat and drank and looked at her breasts.
“Wipe that lipstick off your face.”
Lola took a white bar napkin from the neat pile she’d just made and rubbed at her mouth.
His name was Christopher. He was six feet three, skinny, face and arms hairless, with large, smooth hands. He had a crew cut of black hair and black eyes and a tattoo of a dragon on one forearm and the name MARCY on the other. His father was in jail, which he was annoyed about. He had a motorcycle and he smoked filterless Pall Malls. He took her home that night and it hurt, but it was the right thing to do. She woke up the next morning in an apartment very much like the one she shared with Rebecca, and only a few blocks away, but she knew her life had changed forever.
He left that day, without saying where he was going. She got to work cleaning. There wasn’t much to clean. When he got back around four in the afternoon, he did it to her again, and this time it felt good. Not as good as Rebecca, but it didn’t matter. She was his now, and that’s the way she wanted it.
Lola sat next to him on the couch where they both held bowls of canned raviolis on their laps, and she let her knees gently touch his.
“We’re going to rob that bar you work at. Tonight.”
The only thing Lola could think to say was, “Rebecca’s working tonight.”
“Who fucking cares? You got the keys, right?”
“No.”
“Well then we’ll have to do it before she closes.”
They drank on Avenue B, not far from Mars Bar. Occasionally, he leaned into her and she thought that he smelled a lot like that man in the Cadillac. Where was he now? Pulling into his driveway in Grosse Pointe, or some other posh Detroit suburb? Going home to a family? A wife who loved him? College-age children with futures? The music in the bar was loud and someone was singing, “Yeah, yeah it’s alright, yeah-ah, it’s alright. Baby, it’s alright, oh oh, baby it’s alright.” The bar they were in had air conditioning, which felt delicious to Lola, and she could feel a thin film of salt dry on her skin. Her nipples hardened up into little stiff puckers, and she leaned against the bar and arched her back a bit. Yes, Christopher had that smell, the smell of a man, a real man, the smell of something exotic, someone foreign. He’d told her he was part Cherokee and that was why he was hairless. It was destiny she told herself, it was out of her control, just like the size of her breasts.
It was nearing four in the morning and all the bars were closing. It was only three blocks away. Three blocks and everything would change. She’d have that future she always dreamed about, though vaguely.
“Hurry up.”
Lola skipped along behind him, trying to catch up with his long strides. She was wearing her boots and it still wasn’t easy catching up. But she liked the view from behind, yes. His filthy black jeans, the nunchucks sticking brazenly out of his back pocket. The way he stooped over. Did he have a gun? She doubted it. It was all about his hands, his large, hairless hands.
As they got near Mars Bar, a seemingly homeless man with white spittle around the corners of his mouth, the stench of rot wafting forth from his body and a tiny little crack vial in his hand, tried to stop Christopher.
“Man, man, can you spare some change. I’m hungry, man …”
Christopher hit the man, and Lola watched him fall to the sidewalk.
They were seconds from the bar. The lights were out. For a moment, it was as if New York had gone dark, and the only thing glowing were the man’s eyes, staring up at her from where he lay injured on the sidewalk.
“Help me,” he said, and Lola stopped for a moment before a crashing noise jarred her attention away.
It was Rebecca pulling the gate down, the metal scraping loudly as the gate fell to the sidewalk. But she hadn’t locked it yet, no, not yet. Christopher was a bit ahead now; she scurried to catch up. She saw the nunchucks come out of his pocket and for a moment, she wasn’t the woman she thought she was. She was afraid. She looked away, in fact, she looked down, and she saw that she, too, was glowing, not just that poor man’s eyes, no, but her pale breasts were glowing, and with a little effort she could hide her face in that whiteness, with just a little effort, she could close herself up in all her luck, in all that beauty.
• reading to the blind girl •
MAGGIE IMMEDIATELY LOVED ANYA LANDER, HER ANTHROPOLOGY PROFESSOR AT BOSTON UNIVERSITY, LIKE MANY STUDENTS DID. This was the first most important thing that happened to her at college. It was, in a way, her first chance in life. She wanted to please Anya. And she was an excellent student, but recently she’d fallen in love.
She was in love with Tony. He was ten years older than her and in a band that was going to be signed, she just knew it. Tony gave her hope, at least some of the time. And so did Anya. Anya radiated hope, as well as energy and enthusiasm and possibility. And Maggie craved hope. Her parents had died when she was seven. And her uncle and his wife, who raised her, never meant much to her. When she got the scholarship to BU, she left Indiana in a hurry.
The second week of the introductory course—which was a huge lecture with about ninety students—Anya Lander asked if anyone could volunteer to read to Caroline, a sight-impaired student enrolled in the class. The materials being used were not available in Braille. Anya (as she asked her students to call her) stood at the front of the class, looking out at the vast room of people, her long, curly, truly wild hair loose around her shoulders, a brown denim mini skirt revealing her long, shapely legs. And Maggie, sitting at the back of the class like always, felt her hand rise. Maggie could see the entirety of the students in front of her—no one else raised a hand.
“Great. We have a volunteer,” Anya said, smiling fetchingly. “Come up after class and see me,” she said to Maggie, her large blue eyes shining all the way to the back of the class. Maggie’s heart started to race. It stayed that way for the rest of the hour, thumping away, making her breathe with difficulty. She didn’t know why she’d volunteered. It had nothing to do with wanting to help a blind girl. Maggie wasn’t really that sort. Her immediate, yearning feelings for Anya were what propelled her.
When the class ended, Maggie numbly walked up to Anya Lander. Close up, Anya had acne scars, and her head seemed large for her body, but she was still a supremely magnetic person. Standing so close to Anya made Maggie dizzy. And now, here she was. She could practically smell her. One other person remained in the classroom and that was Caroline, the blind girl. She remained seated in the front row, a mousy girl—short, pale skin, unseeing blue eyes, dishwater brown hair unattractively shaped around her face. Her shirt was ill-fitting; in fact, it may have been put on wrongly.
“Thanks so much for volunteering to read to Caroline. What’s your name?”
“Maggie. Maggie Drescher.”
“Maggie, this is Caroline.”
Caroline stuck a hand eagerly in the direction of Maggie. Her other hand gripped a cane. “Nice to meet you. When can we start? I’d like to set up a once a week meeting. Let’s find out how our schedules work out and set something up. I’m very anxious to stay with the class. I don’t like getting behind in my schoolwork. Can you walk me back to my dorm room? We could figure out everything on the way there.” Caroline’s fingers closed on Maggie’s arm like talons. Anya Lander beamed at Maggie as she guided her new acquaintance out the door.
Caroline was very bossy during the walk, ordering her in a clipped, nervous way. “Turn here. Now go straight.”
Caroline’s grip was too hard. Later there’d be small, purple bruises on Maggie’s arm. Maggie said, “Why don’t you just tell me where you live and I’ll just walk us there?”
“No. No, that won’t do at all in this case, but for other things, that would be great. But for now, I need to always go the same route. I need to learn my way to every class because I can’t rely on people taking me around. I’m often b
y myself.”
“Alright,” Maggie said.
“Just getting to class is a big ordeal for me,” said Caroline, breathing an acrid, nervous breath at Maggie. “I’ll get the hang of it by the end of the semester. And then, of course, everything will change again,” Caroline snorted, and then barked sharply, “Now take a right!”
When they arrived at Caroline’s dorm room, a couple disentangled themselves from each other and sat up from the bed where they’d been clearly fooling around. “You could knock you know,” said the young woman, a chubby, dark-haired girl. The room smelled sweaty.
“You could go to his room for a change,” snapped Caroline. “This is Maggie. Maggie, this is my roommate, Shelley, and I assume her boyfriend, Michael.”
The couple said meek, watery hellos. Maggie couldn’t help but notice Michael’s erection pushing against his khakis. After she looked at it, she looked up at him and then at Shelley. They held her gaze.
“Maggie’s going to be reading to me for anthropology class, since none of the material is in Braille,” Caroline said. “I’ll need time alone here with her. We’re working out a schedule now. And once I give it to you, you’ll have to hump each other somewhere else during our meeting times. Got that?”
They ended up meeting once a week, at one in the afternoon, the day before the anthropology class met. Maggie’d knock on Caroline’s door, and Caroline would open the door for her—it took her longer to get to it than it would a seeing person. To her dismay, this bothered Maggie. She felt impatience rise in her as she listened for Caroline’s noisy approach. “Hi, come in, come in.” Maggie watched her walk toward the bed with its cheap, blue comforter and flowered pillowcases.
Maggie always sat on the floor below Caroline’s bed, on a thin, dusty white rug. She stayed an hour or sometimes more. As the semester progressed, it was often more. The small dorm room, crowded with two twin beds and two desks and two dressers, smelled bad. Often, Maggie would ask if she could open the window to air out the place a bit. Why did it smell? Was it just the smell of other people, a foreign body smell? Maggie’s boyfriend Tony smelled. He smelled like sweat and Speedstick deodorant and leather and like cigarettes, even though he didn’t smoke, because he spent so much time in bars. Maggie loved his smell. To her, it was life.
Maggie read to her from the carefully chosen Xeroxes: “In many narratives of human evolution there is a similar sense that man may be doomed, that although civilization evolved as a means of protecting man from nature, it is now his greatest threat.”
“Huh,” snorted Caroline. “I would’ve been dead meat back then. Left behind for the hyenas to eat. Thank God for civilization and its constructs.”
“I don’t know if I believe that,” said Maggie.
“You better believe it. The blind and the crippled, the retarded and the children and the old people—we’re not the fittest. The survival of the fittest, Maggie. Don’t forget.”
“I bet early man took care of his loved ones.”
“Pass that one by Anya. I bet she’d disagree.”
“Anya never disagrees with anyone. She lets everyone speak their mind. And then she just looks at you thoughtfully. Sometimes I don’t think she believes any of the evolutionary theories.”
“I know what you mean,” said Caroline. “So why does she teach this stuff?”
“I don’t know exactly. Maybe she’s such a great teacher because she doesn’t believe any of it.”
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Anya? Yeah, I guess so. Although she has acne scars. It makes her somewhat vulnerable. It makes her more human.”
“Are you beautiful, Maggie?”
There was something nasal in the tone of Caroline’s question; a mocking hostility.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“What do you look like?” Caroline asked. “Tell me,” she said, in her demanding, aggressive way.
“Well, I’m tall. I’m five eight. And I’m blonde and I have green eyes.”
“You’re not fat, that I know from touching you,” Caroline said, smugly. “I bet you’re beautiful. Yeah.”
Maggie felt ashamed. She felt her cheeks get hot.
“I’ve been told I’m not ugly. That I’m attractive.” Caroline put her hands to her face. Maggie looked up at her, this tiny unseeing person scrunched up against the flowered pillows of her bed. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall. She was pasty, as if she never was in direct sunlight. Her hair looked dirty. But she had a button nose and her eyes were a striking clear blue. She had large breasts pushing against her oxford button down shirt. She was not ugly, no. “I had a boyfriend at my old school, at my high school. I went to a high school for the blind. He told me I was beautiful. But he was blind. My mother always told me I was beautiful. But that’s what mothers tell their kids, no matter what. Not that I know what beautiful is, really, to people like you.”
“Where’s your boyfriend now?”
“We broke up. He started fucking someone else. A seeing girl. Can you believe it? He was very ambitious.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Screw him anyway. She was a snarky bitch. I knew her. She taught at our school. He gets what he deserves. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I do,” said Maggie. “But we fight a lot. We break up a lot. But, yes, I do.”
“What does he look like? Is he handsome?”
“I don’t know if I would call him handsome. He’s not very tall and his hair is thinning. But I think he’s the most beautiful person in the world. I can’t stop looking at him. I see him in my mind all the time. I guess that’s what love does. It makes the way people look unimportant. It blinds you, sort of.”
“Nothing blinds you but being blind, Maggie. You’ll never know what it means to be blind.”
“Of course not! I didn’t mean that.”
“Well, I guess if I can fantasize what it’s like to see, you can pretend to be blind. What the hell. Keep reading.”
“Alright. I’m going to start reading from a new piece, okay?”
“Whatever. You’re the one who can see.”
That night, Tony and Maggie ordered a pizza and watched a movie in his apartment. His roommate, a guitar player in another band, was out. They had the place to themselves. After the movie, in the near darkness of his room, on his futon, they made love. Maggie tried not to look. She tried to keep her eyes closed, but she couldn’t. She didn’t like it that way. She opened her eyes and saw his pale skin glowing in the dark. His black hair blending into the night, but separate all the same. He entered her and she gasped. His eyes were like a night beast’s, black and shining at her. She didn’t stop looking into them until she came, and then she couldn’t see at all.
Caroline listened at first, but as the weeks wore on, she mostly wanted to talk. Maggie felt rushed—she read quickly. Often, Caroline interrupted her. Maggie worried that she wasn’t doing her job properly—she worried what Anya would think. But Caroline was very aggressive. Very needy. She hated her roommates and wanted to talk about them all the time.
“They think I don’t know because I can’t see. So they fuck in front of me. I can hear it. The rustling of their clothes. The moist sound of their bodies against each other. I can smell it. I hate them.”
“Have you tried talking to them? Telling them it’s not okay to do that?”
Caroline’s unseeing eyes seemed to try and focus on Maggie. Funny, thought Maggie, this girl has been blind her whole life, but her face, her eyes, still appear to try to see. Caroline looked down from her perch on her bed, and it was her nose that really pointed toward Maggie. Her white oxford shirt was buttoned incorrectly and wasn’t very white at all; it was a grayish yellow. Maggie wondered if she should say something to her. She would say that to a friend, she would tell a friend, your shirt’s buttoned incorrectly. But with Caroline, she hesitated. She felt the rules were different. And besides, she didn’t feel like Caroline was a friend.
�
��Of course I talk to them about it! I start yelling at them to stop! I’m not one to keep things bottled up inside, surely you’ve figured that out by now. You know what they do? They laugh. They laugh and keep doing it.”
“Maybe you should try and get a new room.”
“I don’t think so. That’s the last thing I need, to try to reorient myself. They are the ones who should go. They should go straight to hell. Fucking cunts, both of them. Michael’s nothing special is he? I mean, I can tell from the way he talks. Once, he let me feel his face, too. I’m right, don’t you think? Nothing special, either of them. And Shelley’s fat! That I know!”
Maggie decided she hated Caroline’s roommates, too. One week, upon arriving to Caroline’s room, the two of them were there. Caroline wasn’t.
“Oh, Caroline’s friend,” said Shelley sarcastically, lounging back on the bed with Michael. It was the middle of the day, but clearly they’d been fucking. Maggie was like that with Tony. She wanted to fuck him no matter what time of day, no matter where, no matter anything. She was like them, she thought, her face growing warm.
“You know, Caroline’s really upset with your behavior.”
“Caroline’s really upset about everything,” shot back Shelley.
“Stop fucking when she’s in the room. She knows. She doesn’t like it. It’s cruel.”
“We don’t fuck when she’s in the room, not that it’s any of your business.”
“Somehow, I don’t believe you,” Maggie said, although her resolve was faltering. Maybe they didn’t fuck in front of Caroline. After all, Caroline couldn’t see, she couldn’t really know.