All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (25 page)

I put my hand down and found her crumpled up dress. I couldn't see a thing, so I reached for her, but she smacked my hand away.

“No one touches me. I'm dirty. I'll make you dirty,” she said.

“You're not dirty.”

“Dirty whore.”

“You're not dirty and you're not a whore.”

I couldn't take the scrubbing, the sound of her feeling dirty. Even knowing she wouldn't like it, I reached out to stop her.

She screamed and tried to shove me away, but I caught hold of her hands, and got the bar of soap and the washcloth away from her. Her arms were slippery, too hard to hold. She jerked one free and managed to punch me smack in the left eye. Lit up the whole inside of my skull. I been in bar fights where I didn't get decked that hard, but once I had her tucked under my arm, she wasn't big enough to put up a real fight against me. The water running off her soaked through my jeans and made the floor slippery. She'd been washing in cold water and bleach.

When I reached for the towel I knew was hanging behind the door, something sharp—Wavy's knee—caught me in the kidney, almost doubled me over, and I slid into the wall with a thump.

“You kids quit making so much noise,” Val yelled from her bedroom.

I waited for Val to open the door, turn on the light, and find me wrestling with her naked daughter, but Val didn't get up. She didn't even call again. It boiled my fucking blood.

“You stupid bitch! I could be in here raping her! And you can't even get your ass out of bed to come see what she's screaming about? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

No answer to that.

While I was yelling at Val, Wavy finally stopped fighting me, and I got the towel around her as best I could. In the dark, I carried her up the stairs, expecting more darkness, but the moon lit up her whole room. Full moon. Did that explain what I'd done?

After I got Wavy under the covers I took the towel and dried her hair. She laid there shivering and let me.

“You have to talk to me,” I said. We weren't gonna solve this with charades. “You're
not
dirty. Why would Val say that?”

“Liam not to be trusted.” She always said it that way, like it was his name.

“What about him?”

“Sitting on his lap.”

“When?”

I knelt next to the bed, with the covers pulled tight over Wavy, but she slipped a hand out of the sheets and touched my arm. Then she found my hand and squeezed it. I squeezed back.

“Before I could read,” she said. “And Mama said, ‘Don't touch her. That's dirty! If you touch her you'll go to hell! No one touches her!'”

“Did Liam do something to you?” After what I'd done, I knew I didn't have no business feeling self-righteous, but this hot thing welled up in me. If Liam had messed with her, I was gonna kill him. Choke his fucking neck with my bare hands. “What did he do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“What was he doing when Val told him that?”

“Reading to me.”

I tried to picture Liam with Wavy on his lap, reading her a story. I couldn't manage it 'til I remembered even my pa did some nice things. Took me to a few ball games. If Jesse Joe Barfoot had a few days when he was a decent father, maybe Liam had some, too.

And Val was crazy as hell. The kind of person who could see her daughter on her husband's lap and think the worst thing. Might explain why Liam never went near Wavy. If your wife accused you of doing something nasty to your baby daughter, you might think twice before you ever touched her again.

“He didn't touch you? Not—” With her holding my hand like she still trusted me, my throat about closed up around what I wanted to ask. “Not in your private place?”

“No. She said he would, but he didn't. She said all men would.”

“Wavy, I'm sorry I—”

“Now you'll go to hell and it's my fault, because I'm dirty.”

“If I go to hell, it won't be because of you.” I was definitely going to hell, but that wasn't her fault. “And you're not dirty.”

“You said.”

“I said
it
was dirty, not that
you
were dirty. You're a good girl.” My knees were killing me, so I sat down cross-legged next to the bed, keeping her hand in mine.

“Why is it dirty? You liked it,” she said.

“Because you're thirteen.” There were a lot of other reasons I shouldn't have been fooling around with her, but that was the big one. “You're not old enough.”

“I'm old enough to like it.”

She pulled more of my arm under the edge of the sheet and pressed her cold, bare little tit into my hand. I jerked it away without even thinking. For a while, she laid there quiet. Then she snaked her arm out of the covers and dropped something that clattered next to my knee.

I patted the floor and found her ring. I'd been so hell-fired against anybody turning it into something nasty, and then that's what I did.

“Wavy, this is yours. I gave you this because I love you.”

She turned over, away from me, and sighed real heavy. She'd used up all her words. Maybe for months. I'd never heard her say so much. Holding that ring in my hand, I came up with three things I could do. One was really bad. One was too awful to even think about. That left me just the one option.

The radiator rattled and it got me moving. I pitched the wet towel on top of it and sat down on the bed. I held the ring on the tip of my pinky to keep track of it while I pulled off my boots and jacket. I shoved Wavy toward the wall and lifted up just the quilt, keeping the sheet between us. She was wound tight when I put my arm around her, her spine stiff against my chest.

“I love you, Wavy. I love you.” I said it until she relaxed. “Now put your ring back on.”

She didn't move, but when I leaned up on my elbow and reached for her hand, she didn't pull away. As I tugged on her arm to turn her towards me, I let the sheet fall back so her tits were naked in the moonlight. They were beautiful, and she trusted me enough that she'd let me touch them. She stared at the stars on the ceiling while I put the ring on her finger.

“It's not dirty,” I said. “I was stupid to say that. It's not dirty if you love me as much as I love you. And I love you all the way. But we gotta go slow. We went too fast tonight.”

She wiggled the ring on her finger, and I worried she was gonna take it off again.

“That night I first saw you, I was going too fast. There I was rubbernecking at you and dumped the bike. Wrecked me up. I don't want to wreck us up like that. I don't want you to get hurt.”

She eased her hand up my arm to touch the scar. The ring was still on her finger and she looked at me, looked me in the eye. Real slow, like a striptease going in reverse, she pulled the sheet up to cover herself and nodded.

 

12

WAVY

March–June 1983

Kellen was unhappy. I could smell it on him.

I went with him when he got his hair cut, and the barber said, “Hey, this ain't your daughter, is it, Junior?”

“No.” Kellen swallowed hard and said, “This is my girlfriend.”

I was happy to hear that I was his anything, but the ring was heavy on my finger and I wished he'd said, “This is my fiancée.”

The barber looked at me while he cut Kellen's hair. The way Kellen looked at engines, to figure out what was wrong with them.

To see what the barber saw, I looked at myself in the mirror behind the barber chairs. Too young. I tried to be more like Sandy, but I still looked like a little girl.

Opening my jacket, I pushed my shoulders back against the chair and slid my hips forward. I crossed one leg over the other so that my foot dangled. Then I rested my forearms on the chair and let my hands hang from the wrists. Slowly, I leaned my head back and made my eyes soft. The look Mama used to make Liam come to her after they fought. The limp limbs that invited, the soft eyes that promised things.

The barber would have come to me, if the invitation had been for him, but Kellen blushed and looked away. I didn't know what to do, because the things Mama and Sandy did when Liam was upset, I wasn't allowed to do those things to Kellen.

Night after night, he sat next to me on the sofa, watching TV. Never on my bed or the recliner. He held my hand, but he didn't put his arm around me or touch my hair or kiss me.

If he didn't want to touch me, I could accept that, but I wanted to touch him. That was never against the rules before, but it was now. All of December he didn't let me touch him, and then I spent winter break at Aunt Brenda's without him. Now January and February were gone, and I still wasn't allowed to touch him.

Even though he wouldn't say it, I knew what he felt. I'd felt it enough to know. Dirty. Too dirty to touch. Too dirty to be touched.

If he wouldn't touch me, that was bearable, but to have him look away from me wasn't. I needed him to see me.

On the sofa that night, after the haircut, he reached for my hand. I looked down at his jeans, the ones he wore for his birthday that got ruined by bleach. Bright white spots already going threadbare. Because of me. I pulled my hand away and said, “I'm too dirty to touch.”

He jumped like a bee had stung him and leaned forward to put his elbows on his knees.

“No, sweetheart. I told you. You're not. You're beautiful. I love you, but you're only thirteen. So we can't be fooling around.”

He didn't look at me when he said, “You're beautiful,” so he might as well have said, “You're invisible.”

“I'm sorry I made you dirty.” Saying the words felt like swallowing burning cigarettes, but I had to say them.

“You didn't make me dirty. You couldn't, because you're not dirty, okay?”

“Then you're not dirty.”

“Okay, I'm not,” he said.

I slid my hand along his belly toward his buckle, but he shoved my hand onto my leg and pressed on it to make it stay. “Don't, Wavy.”

After that my words were hot enough to burn my tongue, but I couldn't swallow them, either. They stayed in my throat, so that I almost couldn't breathe. I stood up and went into the kitchen, because I wasn't going to cry in front of him again. As quietly as I could, I pulled on my coat and slipped out the back door.

Orion was in the sky, but the clouds hid him, so there was no sense cutting through the woods, where it would be dark. I followed the safety rule—
walk facing traffic
—and made it as far as the second stoplight before the Panhead rumbled up behind me. Kellen rode ahead and turned around to pull up facing me.

“Get on. I'll take you home if that's where you want to go,” he said.

I ducked my head and kept walking. After I passed him, he turned the bike around and pulled up beside me, going the wrong way down the highway, his boots dragging in the dirt of the shoulder. His arms were bare, muscles tense as he braked and clutched. He came out in his T-shirt after me, so I was guilty twice. I made him unhappy and he was cold, but walking was the only thing that kept me from crying.

“Please, Wavy. You're breaking my heart and I don't know what to do.”

He was unhappy when I was there, he was unhappy if I went away, and I was miserable. Now I understood what Mama's hot, scary eyes meant when she danced with Uncle Sean. They meant everything was broken.

“I broke everything that made me happy,” I tried to say, but I had to press my hands against my eyes to stop the flood.

Kellen grabbed my wrist and put my cold fingers to his warm mouth. After he kissed the ring, the worst of the words slid down my throat. He lifted me up to the gas tank in front of him and when I kissed his neck, he didn't stop me. After I kissed his neck, I kissed his cheek. After his cheek, his lips, and then he kissed me back. He loved me. If the mouth was a dirty place and he wasn't afraid to kiss mine, I wasn't too dirty.

A car honked, and Kellen said, “Get on the bike, sweetheart. It's cold out here and we're giving everybody a show.”

After that we only pretended to watch TV. Slow was a game. While Kellen ate the dinners I cooked for him, I ran my hands along his shoulders until he took off his shirt to have his back rubbed. Once I rubbed his back, I could touch his bare chest and his belly. Almost to his belt buckle.

Even more than I wanted food, I wanted his flesh. I wanted to touch the places where he was hard, and the places where he was soft. He didn't like his soft places, but I wanted them the way I wanted mashed potatoes made with real butter. I had nothing on my body like the warm damp crease between his tits and belly. Nothing like the muscles that bulged in his arms when he used the pulley in the shop ceiling to hoist engines out of cars.

Kellen's slow game was different, like getting a wild rabbit to take a piece of carrot from my hand. If I tilted my head a certain way when he kissed my mouth, he might kiss my throat, too. If I reached my arms up around his neck, his hands would slide down to my waist, searching for skin to touch in the gap between my T-shirt and skirt. I had to invite him, like the stories where you have to invite the vampire in.

Sandy said, “The right outfit will make or break a date.” Kellen would never take off my dress, but he would help my T-shirt creep up and up. Sandy was right about that, too. The tight shirts made me look older. They made Kellen want to touch more than my hair, and he didn't mind how small my tits were.

If I went slow enough, I was allowed to touch him almost everywhere. Almost. He said, “Slow down,” so many times that even when he let me go faster, I went slow to tease him. A different game. To make him say, “Faster.”

One night in the meadow, we kissed until our lips were raw, and my T-shirt was off and my panties were wet under my skirt from rubbing against his thigh. He would run his hand up my legs, but he was too nervous to touch me there. Finally, he let me unbuckle his belt and take him in my hand. I went slow, so slow, until he was breathing hard and his voice was deep in his throat when he said, “Wavy, you're driving me outta my mind.”