“I’m a virgin,” I say. “My name’s Lacy and I’m a virgin. I speak French.”
They smile at me like it’s the only truth there ever was. It’s nice and I’m warm and full. Everyone tells me they love me before I go.
The Truth About Miss Katie
I didn’t like it when I heard what Miss Katie said at her going away party. And I probably shouldn’t have been listening but I wanted to tell her goodbye. At the party she said, “Excuse me I have a phone call,” and then she didn’t come back in for a long time so I went out the bleachers where she always talks on the phone because she says that’s where she has best reception and I wish I didn’t hear her. What she said. She didn’t know I was there. And that was rude I guess and not good manners but Miss Katie is my favorite person—or was—because she’s smart and pretty and always has her nails done nice and she told me that one time that my bush baby I did was looking so cute in the bush.
I had never done art before, I mean I’d seen it on TV like on Disney Channel and the Miley Cyrus show when she had to do a thing called a self-portrait. But that’s why I loved when Miss Katie came. I just wanted to try art. You hear about it in all the stories, people painting, looking at paintings. I know that paintings are in museums because the library book I checked out told me about it. I’ve never been to a museum before either.
I heard that in the 6th grade we can go see a museum on the big field trip that the 6th graders take. They take us up to UNC to see the basketball court where Michael Jordan played and then they take us to a museum. We got to raise money to get up there though because we have to get this real big bus to take us and you have to get there real early at six in the morning and you CAN NOT be late. Or you’ll be holding up your friends!
So I wanted to do this art. And I had never heard of a bush baby before either until Miss Katie came and read us that story about Africa and she showed us how to draw animals from Africa in white crayon on white paper. And I know that sounds crazy because how are you gonna see anything with white crayon on white paper? But when you put the watercolor on it, it shows up really good. Well like I said, Miss Katie said I did so good on my bush baby, “Pretty eyes,” she said. “Between you and me it’s the best one in the class.” And that made me feel good.
When I got my period I thought I was hurt and I didn’t know what was happening to me and I was crying in the bathroom stall at school and Miss Katie came in there and told me I was okay. She said I should be proud, that it meant I was becoming a young lady. She said she had one too. And she gave me a pad to put in my panties. And when Grandma picked me up from school that day Miss Katie walked out with me to Grandma’s car and held my hand and she said, “Your granddaughter got her period today at school and I hope I didn’t overstep my boundaries or anything but she didn’t know what was going on and she was scared…” And then Grandma interrupted her and said, “That girl needs to feel scared.” I could tell Miss Katie didn’t know what to say then.
My Grandma is the bossy type. More bossy than Miss Katie. She don’t let us keep the lights on at night because of the electric bill and so when the sun goes down me and brother and sister sit in our room in the dark just talking to each other and sometimes my baby sister is afraid and I hold her and scratch her back real light like you’re barely touching her to get her to go to sleep. You can’t do it too hard or it won’t work. And Grandma won’t send me to school but with one pad. She says they’re expensive. So I told Miss Katie and she brought some pads to school just for me. And now whenever I feel the blood coming out of me I can change pads as much as I want. I hate feeling like I’m sitting in my own blood.
But Miss Katie said that I was a smart girl, a curious person, and that meant I was exciting. Miss Katie says to be normal is one of the most boring things in life. She taught us paper ma-shay. She has a paper ma-shay of her boobs that she keeps in her desk, she showed it to me one time.
She said I was a real artist. She really liked everything I’d paint. “Good color choice,” that’s something she always said. She said that on my self-portrait. That’s also when she told me I was beautiful. “See,” and she pointed to my face and said, “This is just beautiful.”
Miss Katie made me want to be a teacher. She taught me so much. And I wanted to tell her goodbye. I wanted to tell her how nice I think she is and thank her for all she’s done and ask her if she thinks we’ll ever see each other again.
I wanted to give her a gift. I wanted to paint her a painting. A thing called a still life, of opening spring flowers, but she never even got around to staying around here long enough for me to see any spring flowers open. And I didn’t want to ask Grandma for a canvas. Grandma wouldn’t even let me explain what a canvas was. She said, “None of that mess.”
So I stole some paper from school and did a self-portrait at night in my room in the dark. I had to try it over and over again for a while like that until it came out good. Because I couldn’t really see what all I was doing, but I got the hang of it after a while. And that’s what I wanted to give her, the self-portrait I did, because it had gummy worms on it, floating around my head.
Miss Katie asked me what was my favorite restaurant and I said that even though I love McDonald’s, and McDonald’s has toys ’cause my cousin Terri works there and she brings them to us from her work, I have never been to the Golden Corral. I’ve seen the commercials and I don’t even know where it is around here but the TV says that the Golden Corral is all you can eat—it’s buffet. Kayla says she’s been there and that buffet means the food never goes out. You can eat until you’re so full you’re about to pop. Kayla says if I ever go, to try the BBQ pizza. She says you wouldn’t think it, cause it sounds gross, but she says it’s so so good.
Miss Katie said she’d never gone to the Golden Corral, but she said that she’d take me someday. I told her I heard we can put candy on our ice cream there. “I’m sure,” she said. She said she’d put gummy worms on her ice cream. And I just wanted to know if she could tell me when I went out to the bleachers to find her and give her my self-portrait when we were going to go to the Golden Corral.
But when I got out there, I saw her on the phone and I didn’t want to interrupt. I listened behind the gym, heard her talking some real bad stuff. She was saying, “This place is a shit hole.” And, “I’m just so alone here.” And she told her friend that we’d made her a 7Up cake. Miss Katie was kinda laughing then. She said she spit the cake out in the bathroom. She said 7Up cake was some country shit.
I can’t believe she said that. I mean she told us that she loved the 7Up cake. And it really is so good. We never get it except only on special occasions when Sammy’s mama makes it. We all love it so much when she makes it. It’s my favorite cake.
Miss Katie said the swimming pool here doesn’t even have a diving board. I’d never thought about that before, but she said it so mean. And she said she was scared of getting robbed. She was shaking her head and getting frustrated. “Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “Helping. Yes. They needed me.” Yeah she did show us things, but I never knew that we needed any help.
Miss Katie started crying on the phone and I remembered my sister. She’d be crawling into the fridge at night when she was hungry, when she won’t supposed to be looking for something to eat. It hurt my feelings to hear Miss Katie talk like that. And I want to tell her that I don’t ever want her to come back here again because I hate her.
The Chopping Block
This feels like a really long shower, the way the water’s moving down my body. Maybe it’s because my eyes are closed. I move my tongue in my mouth and think that hole in my gums is getting bigger. I don’t know how it happened or what it’s for. I’m too high to be able to tell if I’m just high as hell or really falling into another depressive episode. Like getting pulled by an undercurrent and not knowing when I can come up for air. Riding around this morning, I thought I ought to press that pocket knife into my skin some to see how fast the blood would come out. I did take note of that.
And I am fully aware I ain’t even washing, just standing in the water, rinsing off. My sister’s damn pool has so many pine needles and leaves, moss floating at the bottom. That’s where I swam to, tried to see if I could lay down there in it. Rub my belly on it. I figured it would be soft.
“Don’t you get into that water. It’s September,” my sister hollered off the back porch. “You’ll get pneumonia.”
I almost died from double pneumonia when I was in first grade.
But I told her if she don’t want a pool in September then to get her lazy ass up and take it down. Her damn boyfriend won’t do it, that old fucker. He’s old enough to be our damn daddy. When I came in the house that fucker was sitting there looking at Wheel of Fortune.
I looked right in his face when I came in and told him that nasty water felt good.
“I reckon it did,” he said.
Back at my old place it was hard. It was like when you come out of the shower and you’re so cold and you want to be warm and you dig through your drawer for some pants and you pull out his pants, your man’s pants, ’cause you’ve felt him in them before.
’Cause you’ve been riding around looking over to your right wanting to feel his knuckles between your teeth. But you haven’t seen your man in months and you don’t know when you’ll ever see him again.
“Let me see your eyes,” the old fucker says to me from the recliner.
I bend down low enough in front of him that he could yank the towel right off of me there if he wanted to. Strange for a sister to be living with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend but that’s what I’ve been doing. And I knew this fucker was a dick before, but now it’s just more apparent.
He’s a piece of shit. Sister’s tires are slick as anything and she’s got to drive to Hertford County to work back and forth everyday and he won’t give her no money to help her get new tires. That’s something My Man would never do. He always paid for my mama’s meal every time we went up to the café for Sunday lunch. Made me so mad when I found out that old fucker was letting my mama pay for his Sunday lunch.
The old fucker cuts his hair close to his head to hide that he’s balding. With my sister so young and pretty he wants to fit in. But I can see the bald spots looking pale from the TV.
“You’re crazy as hell,” he says.
“That’s right,” I tell him.
He calls my sister from the kitchen.
She comes in cradling a bowl of potatoes she’s steady mashing.
“I told you, just look at her. High as a damn kite,” he says it like I ain’t there.
My hair is dripping wet on my shoulders. Collecting in my collarbones. I’m getting cold.
Old fucker says if I won’t kin he’d take me to Jackson and throw me in jail. He’s a state trooper. He thinks he’s hot shit. He says if he goes in the bathroom again and there’s weed ashes on the counter. He says weed like “weeeeeeeeeeeeed.”
My sister stops him and looks at me like she’s saying “Why” but instead she says, “Go on and put some clothes on. Supper will be ready here presny.” “Presny” is an old word we learned from the old people in our family who raised us.
My sister loves me. But we’re really different. We disagree on things she don’t understand. Like if I got pregnant, she don’t understand how I couldn’t at least carry the baby. See, I couldn’t carry it and have it and give it up for adoption. I’d want to hold it and then I’d want to keep it. So that’s why I’d need an abortion. But Sister thinks that’s wrong.
My sister keeps the bulletins from all the children’s funerals she’s gone too. She keeps them in the side pocket of her car. I never knew that until one time on the way to church I was talking about something I don’t remember now. About life not being fair probably, but that it’s only our one life to live, and she pulled them bulletins out at the stop sign and showed them to me. She works at a daycare. She knows lots of children. She said, “This family has lost an innocent child. They had their whole life ahead of them.”
She also clearly believes in God and she believes in the best in people. When she prays to God she feels better. But not me. Maybe that is part of my problem—I have not gone to the Lord about My Man yet.
My sister has a full length mirror behind her bedroom door. I like to look at my full self naked there. I’ve got a dark hair growing out of my left nipple and I pull it out. Then I think I want someone to choke me. Or bite my lip until it bleeds. I’d like someone to slap me in the face. It’s good seeing how much you can take. It’ll surprise you. The more it hurts, the better it feels when you’re finally released.
But no man can touch me now. Only My Man.
I’m all hairy everywhere now. No need to shave because I am a nun except when I masturbate and that is like cosmic sex above me. That is when I remember the time like, for example, when we walked into my kitchen and My Man picked me up and then on the counter, then kitchen table, then floor. It was dark and the porch light came in from the window. He picked me up in his arms then and was in me from under so fast. I was in the air, flying like magic.
Last time I masturbated I touched myself to the idea that all my dead family I knew and loved were reunited in heaven. And they weren’t watching me but they were on a big TV being happy together and hugging each other. And I was watching them and I was very happy. It was nice to see them smiling with each other. They missed each other so much when they were alive.
I put on a real skimpy tank top and Soffe shorts Sister used to wear for softball practice, something to show my scars from where I was in the hospital in that freak accident where they fucked me up when they were taking out my appendix, that’s a whole ’nother story but I’ll tell ya this: I laid there for three months and My Man came to kiss me on the forehead and tell the nurses I needed more morphine. They shot it straight into my veins, right into my arms. The fat redheaded nurse shot it in me the fastest and that always felt best, like a band of angels was beating their wings so graceful together at the top of my head, making warm waves come down into my body. I’d wake up to people from church at the end of my bed, praying. Or Daddy shaking his head, saying I was cut open like a hog.
When I was twelve, my cousin gave me a Norton Anthology of American Literature she used in college. That was the first time I saw a poem that didn’t rhyme. That was the first time I read Sylvia Plath. An associates in arts from Halifax Community College don’t get you much nowhere, but I wrote all my papers on Ariel anyways. That’s when I read “Lady Lazarus” and “Fever 103.” All by myself I am a huge camellia, glowing and coming and going, flush on flush. I didn’t know what that meant then but I thought it sounded magnificent. And I felt sad for no reason.
“Take it easy, just don’t worry so much,” Mama said when I was so afraid of the Book of Revelations at night when I was a little girl and would cry and cry. She’d have to hold me until I fell asleep. I just kept thinking about the floor ripping open. Looking outside and seeing fire coming down. Raining fire outside the window.
And that’s one of the things, I think. My Man claimed he was an atheist. He said he didn’t need anyone or anything to pull him out of trouble. He said he just needed himself. How if his legs had just got broken and he was on the road in the middle of the desert, without a phone, if he remembered someone said to dig a hole with your ring finger and spit in it and mix it around five whole times that you’d survive and get out of that desert, he said he wouldn’t do it. On a documentary about the Holocaust I saw one time, the filmmaker asked the old lady survivor if she believed in God and she said, “When you’re drowning you’ll reach for the tiniest straw.” My Man said he won’t gonna reach for nothing.
And then I didn’t tell him I’d been feeling my heart pulling towards another and I laid down with that other one night and I didn’t let him touch me but that other told me how we’re all made of stars and we really do make up the universe and are made of the universe and how powerful and lonely that felt at the same time and how t
hat’s the origin of the species and only then did I remember My Man. I had never heard that before and I was afraid. I went back to My Man and didn’t tell him about it.
I met My Man online. We matched on OKCupid. He misspelled The Picture of Dorian Gray in his profile. I’ve never read it but had enough sense to know how it’s spelled. So I told him. And then he had a good strong name and then he asked for my number and then he was gonna see me for New Year’s Eve but he got in a wreck on the way to see me. I didn’t know to believe him or not. But it was true. He totaled his truck but he made it out without a scratch.
Then we met in real life kinda on a Google Hangout. I could hear his voice and see how it came out of him. He was sitting on his living room sofa showing me all these little vases and samurai swords. His granddaddy had been an international antique dealer. Sacred soap stones from India. It’s like he had them all in a pile sitting next to him on the couch where I couldn’t see. I was waiting for a shrunken head, for him to hold it by the hair and spin it in front of the camera. He kept bringing them up, asking me if I could see them, as if to say, “Look at this, look at this.”
All I know is the girl he’s seeing now lives in Asheboro and that’s where the zoo is. And I bet you a million dollars they’ve already been there. He drives up on a Friday night in that dirty ass stick shift truck I promised him I’d clean for his birthday. Filled with papers and receipts and bags and clothes and towels and camping gear. Listens to cassettes I used to surprise him with all the time, like Hank Williams. Driving up there and taking her out to a good dinner. I seen on Facebook that she’s got pink hair. I hope he doesn’t get so excited talking to her like he would with me, talking so fast he’d have to stop and suck in that little bit of slobber that was about to drip out his mouth. Them nice lips so pretty that I cry. I hope she don’t sound as good as me when they kiss. When she climbs him like a monkey in the kitchen like I used to do. Putting his head under my chin and reaching for the cumin, he’d laugh and say it, “Coming.”
Sleepovers Page 13