After, we lay together, and he touched my face and wrapped his hands in my hair.
“You all right?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
“You sure?”
“It just made my nose run.”
We lay together not talking, then Del said, “Bring your puss up here.”
“We can wait.”
“What, do you have your period?”
I didn’t say anything, and he moved his hand down to the soft part of my belly, waiting.
“I don’t care if there’s blood,” he said, reaching down to touch the hair. “I ate you before like that.”
“I’m not bleeding. It’s not that.”
“Then let me. I’ve been waiting six weeks for some pussy.”
“Could you just slow down?” I said. “Just give me a chance?”
“Give you a chance? What do you mean?”
I couldn’t tell him the truth about Kevin Keel or my scar, and I also couldn’t tell him how he seemed like a stranger to me just then. Even though he just came in my throat, I felt that I hardly knew him.
“I just have to get used to you again,” I said. As soon as I said the words, I knew I’d hurt him, and I knew he’d have to hurt me back.
“What the fuck, Vangie? I waited six weeks for you and that’s all you can say?”
“I waited six weeks for you, too.”
“You don’t act like it. What’s wrong with you anyway? You used to like to get your pussy fucked.”
“I’m glad you’re home,” I said, trying to make my voice steady. “I just need to get used to being with you again.”
“What’s there to get used to?”
“Everything,” I said. “All of it.” I did not say, You.
We lay there not touching, not talking, and after a while, I sat up. I could tell from Del’s silence that he thought I was moving away from him, getting out of bed. But that’s not what I did. I got on my hands and knees, facing away from him, so he could see my ass and between my legs. I knew he was watching me, and I knew it was all I needed to do. I wanted to end the fight, and I knew I could do it more easily with my body than I could with my voice.
“What’s that for?”
“I want you.”
“Do you?” he said. “You want some of my cock?”
I wanted him to get up inside me and erase anything left from Kevin Keel. I didn’t want to see his face while he did it, and I didn’t want him to see mine. And I wanted to stop thinking.
“Tell me, Vangie. Tell me you want some of my cock.”
I didn’t say anything at first, just went on kneeling and letting him look at me. Then I started rocking back and forth, arching my back and rubbing my breasts over the sheet.
“I want you to fuck me,” I told him.
As soon as I said it, he moved into me.
Even as I was grunting under his weight, or reaching out to slip my hand between his hips and my cunt so I could feel the root of his cock, I’d get a flash in my mind of Kevin Keel. But I pushed the thought from my mind, and I pushed it from my mind, and in the end it stayed away.
Del had an orgasm in a couple minutes. It wasn’t like the nights when he was drunk and could fuck for an hour without coming. This was probably one of the few times he fucked me sober.
“You scared me there for a minute,” Del said after a bit. “I thought you didn’t like to screw anymore.”
When I didn’t answer, Del said, “No, that’s a lie. I didn’t think that.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought you didn’t like me anymore.”
I didn’t say anything, but I squeezed him with the muscles inside me and bumped back against him. He still seemed like a stranger to me, but there was no way for me to explain that to him. Anyway, maybe I was the stranger. While we were apart, things had happened to me, too.
We lay together for a while and Del got soft inside me. He slipped out, slip, just like that, and when he moved off me, he said, “I’m going to wake you up in the middle of the night and make you come. You need it, too.”
I felt a little of his come seeping out of me, and I rolled onto my side to grab a handful of tissues from the box on the floor.
“I took care of myself while you were gone,” I said.
“Did you?”
“A little.”
“You lie, Vangie. You probably masturbated every night.”
I thought about how close he was to the truth, and how far, but there was no point in thinking like that. “I didn’t do it every night,” I said. “But I did do it.”
“I’m glad. I’m glad you took care of yourself.”
When he said that, he sounded like Del, and I felt bad. I thought of all the times he’d made me come and how happy he always was when it happened. No one loved me as much as he did, and I’d hardly thought of him the past week. All I’d been thinking of was June.
“Don’t think I forgot my promise to you, either, Vangie,” Del said to me then.
“What promise?”
“That you’ll trust me this time.”
We could have said I love you, and I love you, too, but we didn’t. We just settled into sleep—Del on his back, me on my belly—the house dark around us, all my secrets safe.
23
ALL Del ever told me about the overdose was how the last thing he remembered was falling down and feeling the rain in his face. He never told me where he got the quaaludes, who he’d done them with, or how it all felt. Still, I knew the OD scared Del. He was scared so bad he got religion.
I guess I shouldn’t have found it so hard to believe. His family was born again, but it was the first time Del was ever interested. He started talking a lot about a higher power, and he began going to church with his family. Even though I didn’t believe in any of it, I thought it would be helpful for Del and me to want the same things, so I went with him to church. I told myself that if anything positive happened, I would not rule it out.
I did that a whole month: sat with my heart as open as I could get it to feel, waiting for some feeling of God to come. I didn’t know what I expected to happen—a flutter, a warmth, a happiness. Something. But of course I felt nothing.
“I don’t know,” I said to Del one Sunday when we were driving to the church for another hour of talk about pain and suffering. “It makes me feel worse to go on sitting there, waiting for something that never happens.”
“You just need to keep trying. God knows what’s in your heart,” Del said. His voice sounded so calm and weird that I turned to look at him, but he just kept driving.
He used that same strange voice to testify in church the next Sunday. At a certain point in the service, anyone could stand up and speak about how God was touching their lives, and that was called testifying. Del stood up, thanked everyone for helping him pass through hard times, and spoke a little about how lost he’d been when he was drinking and drugging. He said that all the people who surrounded him had been lost, too, and that he was glad he found a way to free himself from them and find God.
I couldn’t believe it. To me it seemed foolish to let people know that much about you, and dangerous to declare you were on a path so different from the one you’d walked for so long. But what really bothered me was that according to Del’s definition I was “lost” because I still hadn’t found that born-again God.
On the way home I was silent, but Del did not seem to notice. He took my hand and said, “Pretty soon you can start testifying, too. You’ve been through as much as me.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“It’s hard at first. Then it feels okay.”
“I don’t think it’s my style.”
“People will listen to you, Vangie. They’re with you when you’re talking.”
He didn’t need to tell me that—I’d heard all the amens and seen all the nodding heads.
I said, “I don’t want anyone listening to me. I don’t have anything to say.”
“Yo
u will. You’ll find all kinds of things to say.”
It was like there was this one plan, and he was just waiting for it to be revealed to me, and for me to go along with it. Even though Del was taking it seriously, I knew I couldn’t. Wearing my ironed skirts and pretending like I somehow regretted all the drugs and drinking and the fucking that went with them—it was just play for me. No church service could help me with the things I needed help with, and after working all week and moving seven tons of pears, I didn’t think I had to bow my head down to anyone.
Even though I could barely stand the low feelings Sundays gave me, I decided to keep my mouth shut for a while for Del’s sake. He seemed to be getting something out of it, and I didn’t want to do anything to derail him. I told myself that except for Sundays, none of the born-again stuff really affected our lives. Del and I still fucked all the time—until our pelvis bones hurt, until I was raw and Del’s balls ached from banging against me. I didn’t think any of it was what the Christians had in mind for us, but Del didn’t seem to see the conflict.
I was suspicious of the whole religion thing, but I was also suspicious of Del. I wondered how a person could make such a drastic change so quickly. Where did all the craziness in him go to? Did it just disappear? Where was the part of him that came home in the middle of the day and needed to huff PAM in the kitchen? Where was the part of him that bit and squeezed my breasts until he bruised the skin black?
I didn’t miss that crazy person, but I wondered where he went all the same.
IN TIME, the vast number of secrets I was keeping began to eat away at me. I lied whenever I didn’t tell Del that June was fucking Ray’s brother. I lied every time I didn’t tell Del about his own brother and me. And of course I lied every time I got into bed with Del and didn’t tell him about Kevin Keel.
The lie about Kevin Keel was so dark that it began to work on me in funny ways. Sometimes in the middle of the night I would have to get up from bed and go to the bath-room and pinch a mirror between my legs. I worried that in having sex with Del, I would somehow reopen or infect my scar. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I got to the point where I was checking myself two and three times a day. When I started having orgasms again, I got even worse, because I worried that when my clitoris swelled up a little from being excited, the scar might get bigger, too. I felt a little crazy, and I felt like it was getting harder and harder to hide it all from Del.
One night after I came wetly on Del’s mouth—the first time I came that way since he got home—I was terrified. I climbed off him right away and lay with my head down by his feet. He kept his fingers on me, though, playing with me, and when I heard him go to speak, I was sure he would ask me about that little forked place. But instead he said, “Can I get you pregnant?”
After I understood he wasn’t asking me about the scar, I said, “What are you talking about? You know I’m on the pill.”
“No, I mean can I get you pregnant? Can I knock you up?”
His voice was all full of hope, and for a minute I thought he was drunk again, that’s how crazy it all sounded.
“I want to knock you up. I’ve been thinking of marrying you, Vangie, and I want to knock you up.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No, I’m not. Go off the pill. I want to put a kid inside you.”
“Are you saying this just to get me wet?” I asked, because the whole time he was talking, he was playing with me.
“I’m serious, Vangie. I want to come home from work every day and see you like that.”
“You are out of your motherfucking mind,” I said. “I am not interested in a baby.”
“You will be. And you will go off the pill.” He said it just like that, the same way he told me I would testify. Like it was a simple matter of time until his will overtook mine.
Because Del couldn’t get inside me fast enough after he said that, I figured it was all a new kind of sex talk. Since he wasn’t drinking or smoking weed anymore and couldn’t fuck for hours, he had to take off in a new direction in his fantasies. The new fantasy somehow involved me being pregnant, and I thought it had to do with being born again and the sober life he was trying to lead. He’d stopped drinking and was going to church, and maybe he thought that having a baby and settling down was the next step.
A baby was the last thing I wanted. I figured I’d be a disaster at raising it, just the way my folks were, and I didn’t care if I had to take Lo/Ovral the rest of my life to avoid it. There were times I even thought of getting sterilized, because the idea of having a baby scared me so bad. But the scariest thing about listening to Del talk about getting me pregnant was something I could hardly admit to myself, and I got sick when I realized that I liked the way his voice sounded when he said, I’ve been thinking of marrying you, Vangie, and I want to knock you up.
Even though I was terrified by the idea of having a baby, I could feel a thirsty place in me that had drunk in those words and the kind, hopeful sound of Del’s voice as he said them. It was just a little place in me, but I could feel it all the same.
24
JUST as d’Anjou season was finishing, Joe Spancake asked me if I wanted to run a stand at Daubert’s Farmers Market, over in Nila Gap. It was a start-up sort of a deal, Joe said, until they saw if it would fly. I’d work three ten-hour shifts by myself and be responsible for loading up the truck every morning and bringing back unsold produce at the end of the day. At first I didn’t know what to think, then I got glad thinking about the change. So I said yes.
“It’s not a sure thing,” Joe said. “I have to clear it with the owner. I’m just feeling you out.”
But he kept telling me how I’d be perfect for the job at Daubert’s because I was “good with the public,” which I figured was a reference to my waitressing days, and when the owner agreed to give me the job, I think Joe was happier than I was.
“You’re just the right person, Vangie.”
I went, “Yeah, think of it. First waiting tables and now this. Who knows how far I could go?”
I thought Joe would lay into me for being a smartass, but he just looked at me for a moment.
“Is there something else you’d rather be doing?” he said.
From the way he said it, I knew the question was nothing more and nothing less than what it seemed.
“There isn’t anything else I’d rather be doing,” I said, and meant it.
I was to be at the stand from eight to six every day the market was open—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—which meant leaving the orchard with my truck loaded no later than seven in the morning. Since I would be running the stand by myself, when I had to go to the toilet during the day, I’d put up a sign that said “Back in 5 minutes,” take my money pouch, and leave the stand. Customers who wanted to buy fruit would either wait, circle back on their second pass through the market, or buy from some other stand.
“Don’t you worry about someone taking something?” I asked Joe when he told me the setup.
“No one walks off with a bushel or a peck of fruit,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
I remembered the farmers market from times my mom and dad dragged me along with them, and the first day I walked in, I saw the place had not changed at all. The whole of it was a series of old barns with concrete floors, with doors here and there opening to the outside. What a joint it was! The whole place had a funny, rank smell, which was in part from the fruits and vegetables, in part from the blood at the butcher counter, and in part from the hot people working the stands or shopping in the aisles.
Still, I liked the place. I liked to be in the bustle of things. I liked to watch the country people who came in for their weekly shopping trips, and I liked watching the people who ran the stands. There were produce stands, pie and baked goods stands, a funnel cake stand, a stand selling the homeliest kind of farm-wife blouses and dresses, and a jewelry stand selling bracelets, necklaces, and bolo ties made of a metal that lasted a wearing or two before turning sour and gray.
My favorite stands were the ones the Mennonites ran, but that was because I liked to watch the Mennonite boys work. Unlike the girls, who were mainly chunky and homely, the Mennonite boys were almost all good-lookers. I didn’t like the young married men—I thought the fringe of beard they wore made them look silly—but the teenage boys and the unmarried ones my age caught my eye. They had slim hips and thick shoulders from the work they did, and their soft blue or green shirts looked pretty against their tanned skins. Something about seeing all those strong waists rising up out of pants that weren’t cinched around by a belt—well, it did it for me.
So even though it had made me laugh to hear Joe Span-cake talk about how I was good with the public, or to have him say that I had the best attendance of any picker he ever knew, I was glad he got me the job. I liked talking with people who stopped by the stand, I liked making the bushel and peck baskets look nice, and I liked the change apron I wore. I knew I would not have been picked to run the stand if I was a fuck-up, so the whole experience was like getting an award at school, which I never got, or like pulling in some half-decent tips at Dreisbach’s. Plus, the job was about a hundred times easier than picking pears, and I knew I was lucky to be out of the orchard rows.
Still, I missed seeing the trees of the orchard, and crazily, I even missed wearing the picking sack around my neck and waist. When I had the sack on, I felt strong, and when I took it off at the end of the day, I felt like I put my burden aside. It was a powerful combination of feelings, and I knew I couldn’t explain to anyone what it meant to me. But those first steps without the sack after wearing it all day—well, I could have sworn I was airborne.
NOT LONG after I started running the stand at the farmers market, Del took to giving me a baby talk every night as I stood in front of the bathroom sink and punched a Lo/Ovral pill from its plastic cap into my hand.
“No one’s ever ready for kids,” he was saying this particular night. “And you know I love you. I want to knock you up.”
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