by Lorrie Moore
He followed the guy through the room, seizing glimpses of hips and tits sheathed in bright, cheap cloth, girls doing wiggly dances with guys who jogged helplessly from foot to foot, holding their chests proudly aloof from their lower bodies. The music made his organs want to leap in and out of his body in time. His friends were all around him.
A door opened and closed behind him, muffling the music. The kid who’d brought him in sat in an armchair, smiling. Patty lay on a bed with her skirt pulled up to her waist and a guy with his pants down straddling her face. Without knowing why, he laughed. Patty twisted her legs about and bucked slightly. For a moment he felt frightened that this was against her will—but no, she would have screamed. He recognized the boy on her as Pete Kopiekin, who was thrusting his flat hairy butt in the same dogged, earnest, woeful manner with which he played football.
Kopiekin got off her and the other guy got on; between them he saw her chin sticking up from her sprawled body, pivoting to and fro on her neck while she muttered and groped blindly up and down her body. Kopiekin opened the door to leave and a fist of music punched the room. His body jumped in shocked response and the door shut. The guy on top of Patty was talking to her; to John’s amazement he seemed to be using love words. “You’re so beautiful, baby.” He saw Patty’s hips moving. She wasn’t being raped, he thought. When the guy finished he stood and poured the rest of his beer in her face.
“Hey,” said John lamely, “hey.”
“Oh man, don’t tell me that, I’ve known her a long time.”
When the guy left, he thought of wiping her face, but he didn’t. His thoughts spiraled inward and he let them be chopped up by muffled guitar chords. He sat awhile, watching guys swarm over Patty and talking to the ones waiting. Music sliced in and out of the room. Then some guy wanted to pour maple syrup on her and he said, “No, I didn’t go yet.” He sat on the bed and, for the first time, looked at her, expecting to see the sheepish bitter look he knew. He didn’t recognize her. Her rigid face was weirdly slack, her eyes fluttered open, rolled and closed, a strange mix of half-formed expressions flew across her face like swarming ghosts. “Patty,” he said, “hey.” He shook her shoulder. Her eyes opened, her gaze raked his face. He saw tenderness, he thought. He lay on her and tried to embrace her. Her body was leaden and floppy. She muttered and moved, but in ways he didn’t understand. He massaged her breasts; they felt like they could come off and she wouldn’t notice.
He lay there, supporting himself on his elbows, and felt the deep breath in her lower body meeting his own breath. Subtly, he felt her come to life. She lifted her head and said something; he heard his name. He kissed her on the lips. Her tongue touched his, gently, her sleeping hands woke. He held her and stroked her pale, beautiful face.
He got up in such a good mood that he slapped the guy coming in with the maple syrup a high five, something he thought was stupid and usually never did.
The next time he saw Patty was at a Foreigner concert in Minneapolis; he saw her holding hands with Pete Kopiekin.
Well, now she could probably be on a talk show about date rape. It was a confusing thing. She may have wanted to kiss him or to give Jack Spannos a blow job, but she probably didn’t want maple syrup poured on her. Really though, if you were going to get blind drunk and let everybody fuck you, you had to expect some nasty stuff. On the talk shows they always said it was low self-esteem that made them do it. His eyes rested on Lorraine’s hands; she was wadding the empty nut package and stuffing it in her empty plastic cup.
“Hey,” he said, “what did you mean when you said you kept trying to fit in and you couldn’t? When you were in Thorold?”
“Oh you know.” She seemed impatient. “Acting the part of the pretty, sexy girl.”
“When in fact you were not a pretty, sexy girl?”
She started to smile, then gestured dismissively. “It was complicated.”
It was seductive, the way she drew him in and then shut him out. She picked up her magazine again. Her slight arm movement released a tiny cloud of sweat and deodorant which evaporated as soon as he inhaled it. He breathed in deeply, hoping to smell her again. Sunlight pressed in with viral intensity and exaggerated the lovely contours of her face, the fine lines, the stray cosmetic flecks, the marvelous profusion of her pores. He thought of the stories he’d read in sex magazines about strangers on airplanes having sex in the bathroom or masturbating each other under blankets.
The stewardess made a sweep with a gaping white garbage bag and cleared their trays of bottles and cups.
She put down the magazine. “You’ve probably had the same experience yourself,” she said. Her face was curiously determined, as if it were very important that she make herself understood.
“I mean doing stuff for other people’s expectations or just to feel you have a social identity because you’re so convinced who you are isn’t right.”
“You mean low self-esteem?”
“Well, yeah, but more than that.” He sensed her inner tension and felt an empathic twitch.
“It’s just that you get so many projections onto yourself of who and what you’re supposed to be that if you don’t have a strong support system it’s hard to process it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ve had that experience. I don’t know how you can’t have it when you’re young. There’s so much crap in the world.” He felt embarrassed, but he kept talking, wanting to tell her something about himself, to return her candor. “I’ve done lots of things I wish I hadn’t done, I’ve made mistakes. But you can’t let it rule your life.”
She smiled again, with her mouth only. “Once, a few years ago, my father asked me what I believed to be the worst mistakes in my life. This is how he thinks, this is his favorite kind of question. Anyway, it was really hard to say because I don’t know from this vantage point what would’ve happened if I’d done otherwise in most situations. Finally, I came up with two things, my relationship with this guy named Jerry and the time I turned down an offer to work with this really awful band that became famous. He was totally bewildered. He was expecting me to say ‘dropping out of college.’”
“You didn’t make a mistake dropping out of college.” The vehemence in his voice almost made him blush; then nameless urgency swelled forth and quelled embarrassment. “That wasn’t a mistake,” he repeated.
“Well, yeah, I know.”
“Excuse me.” The silent business shark to their left rose in majestic self-containment and moved awkwardly past their knees, looking at John with pointed irony as he did so. Fuck you, thought John.
“And about that relationship,” he went on. “That wasn’t your loss. It was his.” He had meant these words to sound light and playfully gallant, but they had the awful intensity of a maudlin personal confession. He reached out to gently pat her hand to reassure her that he wasn’t a nut, but instead he grabbed it and held it. “If you want to talk about mistakes—shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked.”
Their gaze met in a conflagration of reaction. She was so close he could smell her sweating, but at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn’t follow. She was struggling to free her hand.
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t a real rape, it was what you were talking about, it was complicated.”
She wrenched free her hand and held it protectively close to her chest. “Don’t touch me again.” She turned tautly forward. He imagined her heart beating in alarm. His body felt so stiff he could barely feel his own heart. Furiously, he wondered if the people around them had heard any of this. Staring ahead of him he hissed, “Do you think I was dying to hear about your alcoholism? You were the one who started this crazy conversation.”
He felt her consider this. “It’s not the same thing,” she hissed back.
“You don’t understand,” he said ineptly.
She was silent. He thought he dimly felt her body relax, emitting some possibility of forgiveness. But he couldn’t tell. He
closed his eyes. He thought of Patty’s splayed body, her half-conscious kiss. He thought of his wife, her compact scrappy body, her tough-looking flat nose and chipped nail polish, her smile, her smell, her embrace which was both soft and fierce. He imagined the hotel room he would sleep in tonight, its stifling grid of rectangles, oblongs and windows that wouldn’t open. He dozed.
The pilot woke him with a command to fasten his seat belt. He sat up and blinked. Nothing had changed. The girl at his side was sitting slightly hunched with her hands resolutely clasped.
“God, I’ll be glad when we’re on the ground,” he said.
She sniffed in reply.
They descended, ears popping. They landed with a flurry of baggage-grabbing. He stood, bumped his head and tried to get into the aisle to escape, but it was too crowded. He sat back down.
“Excuse me.” She butted her way past him and into the aisle. He watched a round vulnerable piece of her head move between the obstruction of shoulders and arms. She glanced backward, possibly to see if he was going to try to follow her. The sideways movement of her hazel iris prickled him. They burst from the plane and scattered, people picking up speed as they bore down on their destination. He caught up with her as they entered the terminal. “I’m sorry,” he said to the back of her head. She moved farther away, into memory and beyond.
1995
JAMAICA KINCAID
Xuela
from The New Yorker
JAMAICA KINCAID was born in St. John’s, Antigua, in 1949. Her mother, a homemaker, removed her from school to help support the family when her third and last brother was born because her stepfather, a carpenter, was ill and could not provide for them. Kincaid was sent to Scarsdale, New York, to work as an au pair. While there, she enrolled in evening classes at a community college, and later she attended Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. However, she dropped out after a year and returned to New York, where she began writing, eventually becoming a staff writer for The New Yorker. She wrote for several magazines, and her stories appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker.
Kincaid often writes about colonialism as well as gender and sexuality. Many of her novels are loosely autobiographical, although she once said, “Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn’t admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.”
The author of At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories, and the novels Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then, Kincaid has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Prix Femina Étranger and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont.
★
MY MOTHER DIED at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between me and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind. I could not have known at the beginning of my life that this would be so; I only came to know this in the middle of my life, just at the time when I was no longer young and realized that I had less of some of the things I used to have in abundance and more of some of the things I had scarcely had at all. And this realization of loss and gain made me look backward and forward: at my beginning was this woman whose face I had never seen, but at my end was nothing, no one; there was nothing between me and the black room of the world. I came to feel that for my whole life I had been standing on a precipice, that my loss had made me vulnerable, that it had made me hard and helpless; on knowing this, I became overwhelmed with sadness and shame and pity for myself.
When my mother died, leaving me a small child vulnerable to all the world, my father took me and placed me in the care of the same woman he paid to wash his clothes. It is possible that he emphasized to her the difference between the two bundles; one was his child, perhaps not the only child of his in the world but the only child he had had with the only woman he had married so far, the other was his soiled clothes. He would have handled one more gently than the other, he would have given more careful instructions for the care of one than for the other, he would have expected better care for one than the other—but which one I do not know, because he was a vain man, his appearance was very important to him. That I was a burden to him then, I know; that his soiled clothes were a burden to him then, I know; that he did not know how to take care of me by himself, that he did not know how to clean his own clothes himself then, I know.
He had lived in a very small house with my mother. He was poor, but it was not because he was good; he had simply not done enough bad things yet to get rich. The house was on a hill, and he had walked down the hill balancing in one hand his child, in the other his clothes, and he gave them, bundle and child, to this woman. She was not a relative of his or of my mother’s; her name was Eunice Paul, and she had six children already, the last one still a baby. That was why she still had some milk to give me, but in my mouth it tasted sour, and I would not drink it. She lived in a house that was far from other houses, and from it there was a broad view of the sea and the mountains, and when I was irritable and unable to console myself she would prop me up on a pile of old clothes and place me under a tree, and at the sight of that sea and those mountains, so unpitying, I would exhaust myself in tears.
Ma Eunice was not unkind: she treated me just the way she treated her own children—but that is not to say that she was kind to her own children. In a place like this, brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given. I did not like her, and I missed the face I had never seen; I looked over my shoulder to see if someone was coming, as if I were expecting someone to come, and Ma Eunice would ask me what I was looking for, at first as a joke, but when, after a time, I did not stop doing it, she thought that it meant I could see spirits. I could not see spirits at all, I was just looking for that face, that face I would never see, even if I lived forever.
I never grew to love this woman my father left me with, this woman who was not unkind to me but who could not be kind because she did not know how—and perhaps I could not love her because I, too, did not know how. She fed me food forced through a sieve when I would not drink her milk and did not yet have teeth; when I grew teeth, the first thing I did was to sink them into her hand as she fed me. A small sound escaped her mouth then, more from surprise than from pain, and she knew this for what it was—my first act of ingratitude—and it put her on her guard against me for the rest of the time we knew each other.
Until I was four I did not speak. This did not cause anyone to lose a minute of happiness; there was no one who would have worried about it in any case. I knew I could speak, but I did not want to. I saw my father every fortnight, when he came to get his clean clothes. I never thought of him as coming to visit me; I thought of him as coming to pick up his clean clothes. When he came, I was brought to him, and he would ask me how I was, but it was a formality; he would never touch me or look into my eyes. What was there to see in my eyes then? Eunice washed, ironed, and folded his clothes; they were wrapped up like a gift in two pieces of clean nankeen cloth and placed on a table, the only table in the house, waiting for him to come and pick them up. His visits were quite steady, and so when one time he did not appear as he usually did I noticed it. I said, “Where is my father?”
I said it in English—not patois French or English but plain English—and that should have been the surprise; not that I spoke but that I spoke English, a language I had never heard anyone speak. Ma Eunice and her children spoke the language of Dominica, which is French patois, and my father, when he spoke to me, spoke that language also. But no one noticed; they only marveled at the fact that I had finally spoken. That the first words I said were in the language of a people I would never like or love is not now a mystery to me; almost everything in my life to which I am inextricably bound is a source of pain.
I was then four years old and saw the world as a series of sketches, soft strokes in charco
al; and so when my father would come and take his clothes away I saw only that he suddenly appeared on the small path that led from the main road to the door of the house in which I lived and then, after completing his mission, disappeared as he turned onto the road, where it met the path. I did not know what lay beyond the path; I did not know if after he passed from my sight he remained my father or dissolved into something altogether different and I would never see him again in the form of my father. I would have accepted it.
I did not talk and I would not talk.
One day, without meaning to, I broke a plate, the only bone-china plate that Eunice had ever owned, and the words “I am sorry” would not pass my lips. The sadness she expressed over this loss fascinated me; it was so intense, so overwhelming, so deep: she grabbed the thick pouch that was her stomach, she pulled at her hair, she pounded her bosom, large tears rolled out of her eyes and down her cheeks, and they came in such profusion that if they had become a new source of water, as in a myth or a fairy tale, my small self would not have been surprised. I had been warned repeatedly by her not to touch this plate, for she had seen me look at it with an obsessive curiosity. I would look at it and wonder about the picture painted on its surface, a picture of a wide-open field filled with grass and flowers in the most tender shades of yellow, pink, blue, and green; the sky had a sun in it that shone but did not burn bright; the clouds were thin and scattered about like a decoration, not thick and banked up, not harbingers of doom; it was nothing but a field full of grass and flowers on a sunny day, but it had an atmosphere of secret abundance, happiness, and tranquillity; underneath this picture, written in gold letters, was the word “Heaven.” Of course it was not a picture of Heaven at all. It was a picture of the English countryside idealized, but I did not know that, I did not know that such a thing as the English countryside existed. And neither did Eunice; she thought that this picture was a picture of Heaven, offering as it did a promise of a life without worry or care or want.