by Jane Bradley
My daddy was a man I’d never heard of, a man who came in between the two daddies I knew. He didn’t know me. He just knew that he made me, passed me on, sealed me up in a box on a shelf somewhere, and moved on. Momma said I had eyes like him, that I looked like him. I studied myself in the mirror, looked into my eyes for a sign of the man who made me, but found nothing. I only saw a freckled round-faced girl with a little mouth and big eyes looking back. I only looked like myself.
Three
“Damn, Shirley, the least you can do is move,” he said. My boyfriend got up from the bed, walked to the bathroom, and shut the door. He turned on the shower — I thought he wanted to wash me off his skin, my clinging sweat, that clear bitter salt rotten fish smell of me. I turned over, bit the corner of my pillow, shook, and breathed to release the clenched knot in my chest. I kept my face down buried under the quilt, stuffed the corner of the pillow into my mouth to keep from screaming. I held the pillow, shook with the choked noise, pulse of blood and air in my throat, and cried.
Move, move, move.
My baby dolls gave their heads up easily, just a squeeze and a twist and a pull and snap; the head would roll free, and I could peer in, breathe the new clean plastic smell inside, the hollow pink space like a pearly cave beyond the stiff plastic hole. I turned their heads over, looked inside where the hair was stitched into neat lines, and wondered if my hair grew like that in a tightly woven symmetry, perfect neat rows. I propped their-heads on my finger, made them bob and talk, draped my finger in my daddy’s handkerchief and poked it in their necks, waved them around like decapitated ghosts. Given a new doll I always looked inside their sheer white panties to see the pee-hole, the bare rounded butt, then ripped their heads off to look inside.
“The least you can do is move.”
I tried, but my legs were stiff, squeezed together tight as the molded plastic ballerina in my musical jewelry box, my body still insisting that I was still a virgin if I didn’t want him to put it in.
He was my boyfriend, the one I chose, the first I ever wanted. At fifteen finally I wanted someone for me. But still I went dead as he rubbed me. I was a pork chop being seasoned for the grill. Move, move, move. I could only lie there dead and wait for him to get it over and go away.
I had let the others do things, finger, push and probe, knowing that as long as they didn’t put “it” inside me, I’d stay a virgin. I knew that “it” was the difference between whore and virgin, didn’t know the proper word for “it” yet, just: weenie, ding dong, bone, cock, dick. But I knew “it” made babies, knew “it” made whores and blood, knew “It” hurt, poked at something deep inside you and made you bleed. And you’d never be a virgin again. If you wanted it and they did it, you would be a whore. If you didn’t want it, God knew somehow and would keep you a virgin. Only a girl that wanted it could be a whore.
He was on me, over me, in me, tongue filling my mouth, breath hot on my face, fingers pulling, cock in, out, in, out, in. But he couldn’t reach where I hid like a mouse inside the dark space deep inside beyond the reach of any finger, cock, tongue. I hid and watched his eyes clench, lips open, breathe. He thought he had me, but no one was there. Like the rest. They only thought they had me. I had let them lick and finger, rub me raw with whiskers, probe with their thick wet tongues. I had held my breath against the awful smell of them curling around me like a hard hairy fist. My own hands curled into fists at my sides as my knees tried to close, holding the knot inside.
They turned me over. I pressed my thighs tight, felt “it” hard and hot, poke between my legs as they moved me up and down. I was a rag polishing the leg of a chair, up, down, up, down, the wood glistening in the light. I stayed closed against them, as they whispered, panted, yes, yes. I pretended to sleep, and they let me, knowing I couldn’t possibly sleep with them rubbing me raw like that, my chest pounding, ripped open like a chicken, breast bone pulled apart, the pink skin glistening before it is floured and fried golden brown in hot oil. I was a chicken: broken open, eaten, bloody, and raw.
“Ahh!” they cried out, squirted their hot juice across my skin, holding me against their chest in spasms. Finally they released me, went away, and let me lie there, panties pulled up again over my legs, rolled crooked, tight across my hips and waist. They left, and I was a virgin still.
“Damn, Shirley, move,” my boyfriend said. I chewed on the pillow, crying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” I heard the shower’s white hot noise, could see him naked in there, eyes closed in the steam, safe and deaf to me rocking, shuddering, stuffing my mouth with a pillow, and choking back the awful animal wrenching scream.
He thought I was a virgin, thought it worth a month of trying, coaxing with massage, oils, and wine. “Relax, relax,” he said, but I couldn’t shake the whisper, “Don’t that feel good?” I held my breath, closed my eyes, focused, and pushed my thighs, vagina, hands, teeth all clenched tight as a fist. He thought it worth the struggle, thought I was shy, nervous, and inexperienced. Fifteen and still a virgin he thought, so he was patient until it became such a habit that I got tired of fighting and he finally worked his way in. I let “it” in but still stayed locked up inside, shaking, hiding in the dark black hole of myself, receding farther back into my own cave. He came inside me, but no one was there.
He didn’t know it was my daddy’s whiskers, my uncle’s fingers, all those hands of my mother’s friends that pushed me back and held me. He didn’t know it was the belt buckle clanking on the metal edge of the table rocking, creaking, grinding, into the wall that made me clench the sheet, the couch, the table to keep from drowning under the weight of so much skin, sweat, muscle and tongue.
“Damn, Shirley, the least you can do is move.”
My boyfriend didn’t know that I was thirteen when my mother first put a boy in my bed. He was thirteen too. Billy. A pretty boy, blue-eyed blonde, long limbs. At thirteen he lived as I did, on handouts from hippies, dealing what he could, abandoned by his mother, his father long gone. He smiled as I did, sweet with a soft voice, and those wide-open child’s eyes. He is dead now. Died from an overdose of junk. He was on his way when I knew him. I knew his fear, his need to curl up in a tight fetal curl to sleep, hands and feet tight and covered in his effort to feel safe. They said, when he died at twenty-two, that he was skinnier than ever, teeth rotting, veins wasted, eyes burned out. “He was never a happy boy,” they said, as if I didn’t know. “He was just a kid.” I cried, feeling more grief for this sad lost boy than I ever felt for myself.
He couldn’t do it when they laughed and told him, “Do her, Billy, go on and do her,” as if I were a new pill to be tried, a harmless psychedelic drug. “Go on, get in there and do her,” someone said after my mother lifted my blanket and put him in. I could feel his skinny body, cool skin. My mother had gone back out down the hallway, laughing somewhere, my mother who put this boy into my bed.
My top bunk bed had a narrow shelf of a headboard that still held my dolls, plastic legs spread wide to help them balance upright on the hard plastic curve of their butts, pee-holes covered by white nylon panties under flower-print dresses edged in lace. They sat, lined up in a row, blue eyes, all of them, staring into the dark. The bed shook with the movement of people nicking below me, grunting like bulls it seemed. I knew it was the biker, Frank, doing “it” to Ruby. I’d just seen him in the kitchen shooting up whiskey in his veins. I had seen his denim vest with a skull and crossbones on the back, his colors, the words “The Outlaws” stitched across his shoulders, had seen his scruffy red beard, long white arms covered in needle marks, shooting up whiskey in the kitchen because they’d run out of any better drug. And now he was doing Ruby, snorting like a pig in mud. She was fourteen and panting the way she always panted when we raced across the yard. I listened, tried to tell if she liked it, but she only sounded hurried and out of breath.
I looked at Billy, saw the profile of him looking up at the ceiling. He was smilin
g, holding back a giggle, and I knew if the light were on, I would see him blush.
He moved a little closer, but I wasn’t scared. He was skinny, skin smooth, face prettier than my face, only a boy. So we lay there, held hands in the dark and listened to the groaning underneath. Then I felt it. The familiar slide of fingers over my thigh, the smooth dip into panties, felt the bed shaking, heard the others grunting across the room, and knew what was next. I sucked in my breath and lay there, let him do what he knew he should. A hand rubbed my nipple while the other pulled my panties down, then he was on me, light as a leaf, a sheet, no heavy man this time. I lay still, thinking it was only a story as he moved over me, sucked my nipple like a baby, fumbled between my legs, pulled at himself trying to get hard. My dolls were shaking from the pounding below us, my books slid on the shelf, my rock collection rattled in the white cardboard box. I heard music from the living room, my mother’s loud sneeze, and I knew they were sniffing Bactine from paper bags out there, falling back into a quick rush and bright visions. Sniffing Bactine always made my mother sneeze. I heard Ruby gasp beneath me. I wanted to look down to see if he was smothering her with a pillow. The sound was a hard sound like the breath knocked from Momma when Daddy knocked her down, but it was also light, like the sound she made when Ronnie was doing “it” to her on the couch in the morning when she thought we were asleep. I couldn’t tell the difference. Pain or pleasure. All that grunting and gasping, strange and scary like the sound of rocks breaking, dirt falling, a wall coming down.
Billy sucked at my neck and tried to fit his thing inside me. He got my legs spread somehow but still couldn’t get in. So he rubbed it back and forth against me, and I let him. I would still be a virgin. I was used to this. I chewed the inside of my lip and prayed he wouldn’t get hard, wondered if a man had to have whiskers and stink with sweat before he got hard. I hoped I was safe, prayed I was safe since Billy was a boy. I knew he was a doll too, only doing what they had told him to do. But he did it. He finally squirted a few slick drops on my thigh, sighed, and moved over. He patted my face, then curled up tight next to me like a baby, and fell asleep.
I had an underground house. I found it with my girlfriends in the fifth grade, a square-shaped hole dug in the earth, four feet deep, with a sheet of tin over the top like a roof. We had discovered it one day walking through the woods, sneaked close to the sight of metal lid on the ground and listened. We feared it was a boys’ club hideout, knowing even then it was a danger to get too close to a band of boys. So we stood there under the trees, looked at the tin roof, the clumps of leaves scattered over the sheet metal, the soft black dirt at the hole, the entry, where someone could come out, where we could go in. We stood listening, watching for a sign of danger, someone, something to emerge and attack. There was nothing but the dappled soft green of sunlight in the thick green leaves above, the light feathery whoosh of fallen brown leaves on the ground and wind in the trees. We went closer, crouched and peered in. I saw the bright shaft of light on the other side of the hole where the tin roof didn’t quite reach. And in the dark shadows I saw an old mattress, a cement block, and I cautiously breathed the thick dank smell of dirt.
“Let’s clean it out,” I said, naturally the leader when it came to cleaning up buried things. Without a word they helped me lift and slide the metal roof. We held our breath, beat the mattress with sticks to get the bugs out. Then we pulled, lifted it with sticks on one end to loosen cloth from dirt, pushed it and pulled, laughing and screeching at the thick scurry of bugs. Finally we tugged it out. I said we should make a bonfire and burn it once it dried. My daddy had told me a single unwatched cigarette could make a mattress burn. “Yeah,” my friends said. We were girls who loved to burn things. On Saturdays we’d gather to light my family’s trash at night, watching the sparks fly. For fun, sometimes we knotted plastic dry-cleaning bags, tied them to hangers, and hung them from a tree to light and watch the burning plastic drop in yellow, blue-green, glopping plastic flames.
We claimed the hole and cleaned it out, swept it with whisk brushes pilfered from our parents, and took a tarpaulin to camouflage the tin roof. We worked daily, decorated the dirt walls with sticks, rocks, and weeds. We made plans one day to dig tunnels, expand and perfect our hole-in-the- ground home.
Then my friends grew up and into training bras, wanted to be cheerleaders, to be popular, and chase boys. I lost them the way we lose worn shoes. They just seemed to walk away.
So, as Billy curled like a baby beside me, sleeping peacefully, I slipped out, belly-slid over the side of the mattress, feet carefully reaching, balancing on the edge of the bed below me while the others slept. Once down, I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, crept to the kitchen, grabbed a bottle of Coke, made a cheese sandwich, and slipped out. I ran quickly, softly as any wild scared thing. I ran into the woods, slipped through the trees, and took my shortcut to my secret home.
I sat, ran my palm over the crumbling dirt wall, and remembered how as a girl I stole the little broom and swept those dirt walls and floor clean. I had smoothed the edges and corners with a butter knife, arranged pretty rocks, filled empty Coke bottles with dried weeds. I had made a table out of taped-together shoeboxes and seat cushions out of plastic bags stuffed with leaves. It had become my house. My friends had forgotten it, busy with slumber parties and roller-skating while my mother’s house filled with strangers drifting in and piling up like dust in the corners.
I breathed the cool damp fertile smell of things growing, sweet with moss, leaves, and worms: a smell of fresh decay. I sat eating my sandwich, sipping my Coke. I was all right; I was still a virgin. I would take a bath later, start all over. I was still Shirley and a virgin because nothing had happened, nothing had happened at all.
In time, again, my mother’s hands lifted my blanket. “Here’s a place you can sleep, Lloyd,” she said. “Climb on in.” She giggled and said, “Now you be good to my girl.” He snickered, already reaching, whispered, “I’ll be good, Momma, oh yes, I’ll be good.”
He was a biker like the one that got Ruby, rough hands, tattoos, and cigarettes. A skull and crossbones, “The Outlaws” stitched across the back of his jacket. No boy this time, something closer to a man. His hands had torn engines apart. I had seen him rev his Harley, digging up grass and dirt in our yard. I had dodged his hands that always squeezed my arm. “Hmm, tender, can’t wait to get a bite of that.” They’d all laugh when he grabbed me, tried to kiss my neck. “I’m gonna get you sometime,” he said.
But it was my mother who put him in, my mother, eyes wild from some drug, hair in long braids. They called her Momma B and she laughed in the dark, lifted my blanket, said, “Go on, Lloyd, get in.”
I pressed myself to the sheet, tried to pull away without moving, and faked sleep. He put an arm around me, pulled me close without a word. I went stiff, and he kissed my neck, said, “Relax Shirley-girl.” A lick at my neck. A whisper. “It’ll feel good if you give in.” The hand pulled at my thigh, a grip so tight it pinched. “Don’t fight it, don’t fight. Ain’t no way in hell you gonna win.”
I knew this from the times they had held me on the couch, blew marijuana smoke in my face to get me stoned the way they’d held our dog’s jaws closed, blew smoke in her face, and laughed watching her run across the room. “You’ll feel better if you don’t fight it,” they had said. My mother frowned when I’d resist. “Just do it, Shirley,” she said. “You always were a damned little snob.”
His mouth sucked at my neck, palm covered my bony chest, fingers twisted my nipple as if he could make it grow, open, and give him what he wanted. I heard the couple below me, another biker and a girl who had hitchhiked from Ohio, who kept saying she’d been at Kent State and seen the whole thing. I heard them gasping and grunting the way I’d heard it a hundred times before.
Lloyd pulled my legs apart with one hand, and squeezing my face with the other, he sucked at my mouth as if I were an orange with a hole dug out for
him. The girl below me panted, “Like that, like that, like that.” Lloyd propped himself over me and said, “That’s balling, baby. Think you can ball like that?” He rubbed until my skin burned. I was a table, and he was sanding me down. He bit at my stomach, licked, then spit on his fingers and pushed them in.
The bed shook and the room pulsed with the sounds of mouths lapping, skin slapping, men panting, crying out. “It’s like flying,” the girl below said. I heard that sobbing, panting sound that could have been laughing or crying or just hard breathing. I felt my arms stretched out beside me and told myself I had big metal wings, I was a plane flying, slicing the air like a knife. I’d read the story of the Wright brothers. They had made the fastest bicycles, and went on to leap from dunes and make cold heavy metal fly. They had started out with a bike shop. I could see them, Orville and Wilbur, bending over a bike turned upside down, belly up, gears exposed. They were spinning the pedals, watching the black chain jump. They were trying to find a way to make the machine light, knowing the lighter she was, the less resistance, and the faster she’d go. I could see their backs bent over the bike, perfecting the machine. “Come on, come on, come on,” Lloyd said pulling me with him, rocking me like a wooden horse, yanking me back and forth. I saw the black chain spinning, heard the whirring sound of metal beating air as the wind carried me down a long black road. He pedaled and pumped. My head filled with his clanking noise. I was a machine, clanking, whirring, flying down a long black road.
I ran back to my underground house with nothing but my jacket, fearing I’d wake them if I went to the kitchen to find something to eat. I knew someone could hear me, rustling for my breakfast. Someone could grab me, hold me down again. I told myself I’d live on nuts and berries like the bears, live on nectar like the fairies, live on nothing like the saints.