A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That (16 page)

“You work there, right across the way,” he said, grabbing his chin. “I remember when you—”

“Don't remember, Adam,” I said.

He laughed, nervously. “Okay,” he said.

“It's not a good idea,” I said.

“Well, anyway, you look good, Rachel. You're a better-looking woman than you were a girl.”

“And that's a compliment?”

“Yes,” he said. “You grew into your looks, your face.”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“You grew into your features, that's what I'm saying.”

“Features, huh?”

“That's right. You look good, okay? I like the way you look now. You've grown up, and I—”

“We never liked each other,” I interrupted. I didn't look at him, but stared straight ahead at the wall. It was blank, the wall, and I remembered when pictures of huge-breasted women hung on Ruby's walls, creamy women, naked against black felt. I wondered who convinced the owner, Mac, to change his décor. I wondered if Mac had found someone, fallen in love. I wondered what Adam would do if I moved back to the booth, if he'd follow me or let me go.

“No,” he said, “maybe we didn't.” He picked up his cocktail napkin and began ripping it into tiny pieces.

I stayed on the barstool. I shook my head. “I thought I liked you,” I said, “but I didn't know anything.”

“You knew some things,” he said.

“I didn't know—”

“Do you like me now?” he interrupted.

I finished my beer in one long swallow. “I don't think so.”

“We're different, that's all.”

“No,” I said, feeling the beer, feeling bold. “You were a real fucker, that's what it was.” I turned on the stool and faced him.

“Damn,” he said.

“And I didn't know how to be—” I began, and then stopped myself, realizing I didn't know how to finish the sentence.

“Be
what?”
He let out an awkward laugh. He paused. He lifted the coffee cup and looked inside. “There's no cream. Goddamn, she forgot the cream. I can't drink this shit black,” he said. “Stephanie,” he called. “Hey, Steph.”

“What?”
the bartender turned from two men she'd been serving or flirting with. She set the bottle of vodka down. I heard it smack the counter. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at Adam, then at me. I thought I saw Stephanie wink my way, but couldn't be sure; anything at all could have been happening. “What now, Adam?” she said.

“I need some fat in this coffee,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, reaching behind the bar. She was pouring the cream into Adam's cup and he was still talking. “Make it white, Steph,” he said. “You know I like it white,” he said.

The bar lights did their late night flashing, and patrons began to grumble and gather their jackets. Adam was smiling, and I was still trying to finish that sentence in my head. I looked at his dark, thick eyebrows, his green or blue eyes, and was trying to finish that impossible sentence.

“You want a ride home?” he asked.

10.

Fellatio was one part of a whole, I believed—a piece of a more complicated act, one scene from a full-length play that required two energetic thespians. I'd never been generous or gracious or confident or stupid enough to give a man a blow job in a car or empty movie theater, to give him
just that
on a freeway, to offer up my mouth—the way Angela claimed to—at a stop sign or before breakfast. A hand was one thing, I'd decided long ago, but a mouth was something else altogether.

Still, years ago, in a parking garage outside a Huntington Beach nightclub, in Adam's car, I did just that. He'd wanted to take me home, his or mine, it didn't matter, he said. Neither of us knew then that I was pregnant, that he'd drop me off in front of a clinic in two week's time, that he'd stuff crumpled dollar bills into my hand for a cab home before speeding away, and that the check he'd mail to me for the procedure would bounce. Neither of us knew, and I looked good, really good, he'd said. Had I lost weight? Did I like his new car? Was I letting my hair grow out?

“Out of what?” I asked.

“It was a bob, wasn't it?”

“It wasn't a bob.”

“Yes, it was,” he said, emphatically. “Few weeks ago it was all one length, to your chin.” He cut into his own chin with the side of his hand, demonstrating.

“It was someone else, Adam. I haven't changed my hair,” I said.

“Hair grows. It's growing, that's all.”

“Okay,” I said, giving up.

“You look good,” he said again.

I was surprised at myself, and he was more so, when I unzipped his pants and held him in my hand, right there, in the car, in the garage. “Tinted windows,” I said. “A showy man like you with tinted windows—why? You hiding something?”

When he started to answer, I stopped him with a finger to my lips. “Shh,” I said. “Don't talk, Adam. We've said enough. We say too much. A pair like us should shut the hell up,” I whispered.

He was nodding and breathing heavily. With my free hand I released the emergency brake. I put my chin in his lap and didn't even flinch when I heard shoes outside clip the concrete, a woman's laugh, a man's voice, a car door just feet away opening and closing, the engine turning over, again and again, until finally, the car screeched off. I had this to do, only this. I was determined, eager; it was as if I'd been born or starved with just that meal in mind. I held my lips inches from him, touched him until he stood right up.
All that blood
, I remember thinking,
he's jammed now, stuffed with it.

11.

Moments earlier at Ruby's Room I felt okay or thought I did, but now in Adam's car my head spun. I was quiet until he turned down my street. I believed his red leather interior only added to my queasiness. “It's red in here,” I said. “Everything, Adam—the seats, the steering wheel. It's garish. What were you thinking? When you bought this car, what was on your mind?”

“Not you,” he said, obviously insulted.

I laughed. “Apparently not.”

I asked him to drop me off in front of my mother's building. He wanted to come up. He wanted to talk. “I feel sick,” I told him. “When I'm sick like this, it's hard to be polite. I'm sorry about your car, the way it looks—I mean, I'm sorry about what I said.” I opened the door and stepped out.

He asked for my number, but I didn't think he wanted it and I didn't want to give it to him. Not tonight. Not ever. At one time I would have written my number, somewhere, anywhere—on the back of his hand if he'd allowed it. I would have written down my number before he even asked. “No, Adam,” I said, closing the door, leaning down to see him one last time. He looked stunned, mouth hanging open.

“I thought I remembered you,” he said.

I shrugged. “Sorry,” I said.

He leaned toward the passenger window. “We're old friends. What's wrong with having a conversation with an old friend? Can't I get your number?”

“We're not friends,” I said.

“Not even a number, Rachel?” he tried again.

“No,” I said, “not even that.”

12.

I found Angela's tights in the hall. I poked my head in and saw her bra hanging on a lampshade, one black cup visible, the other hidden, wrapped over the lightbulb, dimming the room. I knew Angela thought it was exciting, a night like this, that in the morning over toast, she'd be full of animated details, but now she was alone in my bed, a woman wrapped in a sheet, a woman who'd been touched and left—in less than two hours.

I went to my friend and covered her with the blanket. Angela's cheeks were moist. She was glistening. I could almost feel it. His scent—that cigar he'd been holding between his lips at Ruby's—was still there, clinging to Angela's skin. “I'll smoke this puppy when I get out of here,” he had said. “I'm a man with patience,” he told the three of us. I thought about that man, generous with the shots of tequila and compliments. He'd liked Angela's profile, her teeth, her dark hair and eyes, her laugh. He'd introduced himself as “Big Brad, the sober one—ten years this July,” but still the shots kept coming. I remembered his puffy face and dry lips, his red nose, his grin as he sat across the bar from us, lifting his glass of water in the air. I remembered him pointing that unlit cigar in Angela's direction and winking.

Here it was just three A.M. and Big Brad was gone, the sober one was tucked under his own sheets or his girlfriend's or his wife's. His harsh kisses, however, were still there, in the bedroom—three hickies on Angela's neck turning from pink to red to purple.

13.

While my mother slept that first night, leech number one escaped, wiggled out from under the gauze and traveled her body, from breast to neck as a lover might have. It twisted by her shoulder blade, pausing at her collarbone, and rested at her neck, where it sucked and sucked and sucked.

In the morning, I opened the heavy door to her hospital room and found the leech there, fat and full—the size of a big man's thumb. I stood with my hands over my mouth, not making a sound. My mother was still asleep or doped up, but what I believed to be reflex or intuition or simply an itch brought her hand to her neck. She opened her eyes, touched it, and screamed. I held my breath.

Two nurses burst through the door, an older nurse followed by a much younger nurse. The older nurse joined my mother, matching my mother's screams with her own equally horrified gasps. The young nurse, a stern woman with a mouth like a cut, glared at the older nurse. She narrowed her eyes and grumbled something I could not make out. She pointed at the door. “Stop it, Donna,” she said, “or get out.”

The older nurse composed herself. She straightened her white pants, adjusted her polyester jacket. She fiddled with the stethoscope that hung around her neck.

I was biting the inside of my cheek. Madly. I tasted blood. My hands shook.

The stern nurse shot a nasty look in my direction.

“Help her,” I said. “Do something.”

The nurse went to my mother's bedside. She twisted my mother's head to one side, and with a gloved hand, slowly, deliberately, peeled the plump creature from her neck.

“Goddamn,” she said to all of us. “Grow up.”

14.

My mother spent a week in the hospital recuperating, and when I wasn't visiting her or teaching, I found myself researching leeches on the Internet. I was gathering facts—perhaps I'd write a series of poems or maybe a story. As was discovered the morning after my mother's therapy began, one problem with leeches is that they migrate, moving from the needy area of the body to other areas, private areas. In the nineteenth century, leeches were reported to have disappeared inside a woman's rectum, attached themselves in the upper airway, and ascended into her uterus.

The Hirudo leech has three jaws and three hundred teeth, and is the leech most doctors, including Dr. Morgan, prefer.

The leech uses its own anesthetic, so its bite is painless—my mother later attested to that.

When the leech was placed on my mother's breast, it injected an anticoagulant serum to prevent blood clotting, which was, after all, the point—why the leech ended up there in the first place—that anticoagulant, that thinning, flowing blood, which fed not only the larcenist worm itself, but the tissue it pinched and visited.

The leech ate and ate, gorged itself until it had ingested enough blood to equal five times its body weight. In the end, before it was dropped into a bin with its satiated cousins to die, it was a bloated, fed thing; it was a body plump with mother.

The whole thing was a vile contradiction, and though I had done the research and tried to think about it rationally, I still had nightmares and a growing distaste for snails and ants and even cats—anything that crawled or pilfered.

Now, mid-December, six weeks after reconstruction and the medicinal leech therapy that followed, the two of us were at Dr. Morgan's office, waiting for the bandages to come off. My mother sat on the table in a blue gown, excited, swinging her legs like a girl. Dr. Morgan had just joined us, and I'd moved from my mother's side to the far corner of the room to give them space.

While I watched the doctor talk to my mother, I remembered that the word
leech
might have been derived from the old English word
laece
, or
physician.
The first written record of the therapy was found in the
Corpus Hippocraticum.
Hippocrates believed that disease, all disease, was caused by imbalance of the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. He thought that the medicinal use of leeches could play a central part in restoring balance. I thought about my mother tipping over in the grocery store, reaching for the frozen peas and falling into the freezer. I stared at Dr. Morgan's back, the tilt of his head, and wondered if, when the bandages were removed, my mother would finally feel balanced, restored, if those matching breasts she'd longed for would be enough.