Fucking Daphne (4 page)

One day I was behind her in the lunch line and noticed when the lady with the hairnet and putrid green medical shirt rang her up. The lady ticked off the name Gottlieb on her sheet of paper and took a single quarter sweetly from her hand, just like she did for me. Both of us had subsidized lunches. Daphne was poor, too. Why was she pretending? She saw me pay for mine.

After the ride home that afternoon, we didn't pretend with each other anymore. It was understood, though, that once we were on school grounds, usually as soon as the bus doors opened, she'd be gone again, pretending. She'd disappear into the tightly protected circle of popular girls to talk about which of the popular boys were the cutest and
Where did you get that sweater?
and
Oh, how I wish my hair were naturally curly!

Once I started watching how she was with them, I understood. She explained to me that she was always scared of looking like trash, because that's what we were. That's why we were on the bus together in the first place, bused in from the poor town forty minutes away. It was safer for her to smile and agree and fade into the background without letting them know too much. She was almost . . . undercover.

Our houses were more than two miles apart. I've been driving for years and now two miles seems like nothing, but then it seemed an insurmountable distance. Outside of school, we never saw each other. Daphne's mother worked at the town pharmacy during the day, then cleaned houses during nights and weekends. She certainly couldn't afford the time or energy to cart Daphne and her sister around to visit friends. For me, there wasn't usually anyone around to drive me anywhere, and I wasn't allowed to ride my bike past the end of the dirt road. My mother worked in Manhattan, two and a half hours away, and lived there during the week. On the weekends, Mom would take me to the grocery store to stock up on canned ravioli and microwave dinners. Sometimes we would go to the mall in some kind of last-ditch effort to be like the families on TV; then she'd leave again.

Daphne lived with her sister and her mother in that big whitewashed house. But the big house wasn't theirs. They actually rented only a third of it: two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen for $700 a month. They didn't have a phone there for a long time, either.

It had started one night just before seventh grade. While Daphne's dad was out at the bar, they all packed up and ran away. They lived in a shelter for a summer, then with her mom's sister. When her dad showed up at their grandmama's, waving around his hunting rifle, their grandmother didn't hesitate to tell him where they were staying. Like clockwork after that, every payday he'd show up drunk at their house, making threats again, screaming things on the lawn for all the town to hear.

He'd stand out there, yelling, “A proper wife spreads her legs for her man every once in a while, Sara Jane! Even your goddamned
sister knows that.” That's when they moved a few towns over, into the big white house. Daphne never mentioned much about any of that, though.

There was a lot I didn't talk about, too. I didn't tell her that the only reason I went to school at all most days was to sit with her for those two hours on the bus. I didn't tell her that I would lie awake at night, making up stories about the things I did, just so I wouldn't sound so sad and lonely. In ninth grade, when my uncle came to live with me, I didn't tell Daphne the things he snuck into my room to do. I made up funny stories about hard, purple hand-shaped bruises on my arms and why I wore long-sleeved shirts all the time. I never told her about how he would knock me down to the floor and try to strangle me. How he would hold my arms down and fuck me. I never told her about those times I was there alone, with my uncle's long rifle propped between my knees and my big toe curled around the trigger; that the only thing I could think about was how sad she would be when she heard I was gone, and how sad I would be to not see her again.

I still haven't told her most of these things.

By sophomore year, I'd joined the track team just to spend more time with her. One day, while everyone was stretching, she pulled me into the gym storage closet. It was dark and crowded floor to ceiling with faded gym mats and extra football padding. It was usually unlocked. We called it the “hummer closet” because it was where all the popular girls took their boyfriends for blow jobs during study hall. Everyone called those girls “hummers”—they were the first ones who knew that humming makes it better. The closet smelled like moldy foam and hormone-saturated adolescents.

Daphne leaned close and my heart fluttered. I thought she might try to kiss me, but instead she whispered excitedly, “I did it.” She had a big grin on her face.

“Did what?”

“It.
It
it,” she said. My stomach dropped to my sneakers. We talked about sex all the time, but I never thought she would seek it out. She saw my face fall.

“What? Aren't you happy for me?” She rolled her eyes. “I'm so glad that's over with!” I'd thought I would be able to tell somehow, that she'd have a glow or something. But she was there in the hummer closet, in her track sweats and a big T-shirt, her long hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was looking no more a glowing, satisfied, mature woman than she had been two weeks before when they huddled together on the brown plastic-covered bus seat, away from the boys and the younger kids, wondering what the first time would feel like. Would it hurt? Would it even be good?

“I just, yeah, well, I sort of thought I would be first,” I said. And in my head I realized I wasn't sure if I meant I would be the first to have sex with someone, or the first someone to have sex with her. “I mean, you're just so . . . good.”

Daphne got mad at me for that, for thinking that I was the easier one, that she was the prude. And technically I
had
been first, years before, as soon as my uncle moved in, but I knew that didn't count, and I certainly wasn't going to admit it had ever happened that way.

I got mad at her, too. Or maybe I was just jealous—jealous of him, jealous of her, or maybe just jealous that they both got to choose. She was only halfheartedly dating this college boy, John.
She continued with the details: how she'd given up on holding out for a romantic, flowery true-love scenario and had told him to drive to a seedy motel off the highway to “get it over with.” It seemed like a bad ending to me.

That summer I fell hopelessly in love with Maddy, a girl I met at the community pool. We would have confused, passionate sex on her tiny bed while her parents slept cluelessly across the hall. John started giving Daphne rides to school. I hated him.

Daphne and I stopped talking so much. Occasionally something would happen and we'd be there for each other to catch a fall. She called me when John got drunk and angry and hit her. I held her and told her she deserved better. I called her in tears the last time I was pushed down and beaten. My uncle had come into my room, yelling and maybe drunk. I was drinking a can of Coca-Cola. His hand flew back to hit me and I threw my soda can at him. His arm flailed and vaulted the can back toward me. He pushed me down on the bed and held me there, foamy soda stickiness everywhere. I pulled some of his hair out and pushed him away. I was getting stronger. I was sixteen and was training as a shot-putter on the track team, lifting weights two hours a day, running laps for one hour.

I thought,
I'm not a little girl anymore. This is the last time.
And it was. I shoved past him and called Daphne. I was stone. I had been yelling, full of white-hot rage. But as soon as I heard her voice, I burst into tears.

“Can you come get me?” No questions asked, she came and picked me up in her mother's car. I curled into the passenger seat, still crying and shaking.

Daphne led me into her room and laid me down on her single bed. I stayed curled there while she got a wet rag and cleaned the sticky caramel soda off my face and hands. I never mentioned how it got there, but I knew she understood. She stroked my hair and brought me water and a towel and clothes to borrow. She told me I could shower if I wanted to, and left me alone. I stayed there for three days, curled in her bed. At night we talked and spooned and I wished there was some way I could stay there forever. The weekend came and my mother arrived and collected me, but I was right. It was the last time. He never came near me again.

Toward the end of school, things between Daphne and me started alternating between distant and tense. I knew I loved her by then, and what that meant. She said she couldn't be “that way,” for her family's sake. I left for college in Pittsburgh, and she stayed and went to Bard. We wrote letters sometimes. Mine were honest and pitiful accounts of what she meant to me and all the things we could do if she visited. Hers were about her classes and days and friends, with only vague proclamations of friendship to reassure me. She always signed her letters, “I love you, Daphne.” I clung to that desperately. Late at night I would pull the letters out of their envelopes just to stare at that last line.

Something at school wasn't right. After a year of it, I left and moved to Brooklyn to figure out what I needed to do, what was wrong with me, who I was.

Sometimes, when I had a day off from work, I would drive upstate. I would show up at Daphne's house when I was feeling lost or lonely. One night I got there and she was alone. She was angry at me for showing up, and after a few tense words she led me to the front door just off the kitchen.

“Can I have a kiss goodnight?” I said. I don't know what I was thinking; we had never kissed and I didn't think she would budge on the matter. She was already annoyed and I was trying to push buttons. I might have been trying to make a joke. Daphne got really serious.

“Why do you always do this?” she said. We went back and forth, playing word games with each other.

“Do what?”

“This.”

“This what?”

I was standing in the doorway, my hand on the knob. She was standing in front of the sink. A lightbulb went off in her mind; I could almost see it. She grabbed an eight-inch knife out of the dish drainer, looked me in the eyes, and touched the blade. I felt my groin give a little kick. My throat made a noise, that
ungh
sound of being unexpectedly and deeply fucked. I didn't mean to make that noise. I didn't expect that noise. I surprised myself.

She smiled slowly and said, “Are you scared?”

I moved to the center of the kitchen.

“Can you put the knife down?” I asked. I was getting nervous.

“Why? Don't you trust me?”

“Yes, but . . . it's just . . . ”

And she stepped toward me with the knife. She held it flat between our chests, with the point of the blade grazing my chin, as her hips pinned me to the kitchen counter. It was the perfect kiss. I would have fallen over if my fear of a tracheotomy weren't holding me up.

Daphne stepped away and gingerly put the knife in the sink.

“There's your goodnight kiss. You should go now.”

I could barely stand. I made it out the door and drove the two hours back to Brooklyn, reeling.

She called the next day.

“I don't know what that was, but . . . wow,” she said and my stomach fluttered a little.

I started going up to see her whenever I could, usually on my one day off from my job at the bookstore. We would go a little further each time. By week four we were lying on her bed, still that single bed in her mother's rented house, though her sister's bed had moved to the living room. We had our shirts off and were facing each other, staring. We started playing a little unspoken game. The game was to maintain eye contact, no matter what the other person did. She lost when my fingers squeezed down hard on her nipple. She gasped and her head tilted back. I was in heaven; I had waited years for this.

I ordered her to keep looking at me. My hands drifted down underneath the covers, underneath the band of her underwear. My fingers slid easily inside of her. Her eyes stayed locked on mine the whole time she rode my hand, and only closed when she shuddered and came. Daphne rested for a minute.

“That's never happened before, not like that.” She was still panting a little.

“That's because you've been sleeping with boys,” I laughed.

She played at being insulted and tumbled onto me, pinning me on my back. She told me to stay there, and she leaned over. She was reaching for something under the bed. I was enjoying the view. She pulled out another kitchen knife, just as big as the first, and stood on her knees above me, holding it up for me to see.

I really got scared this time. I knew exactly how crazy we both were. She must have seen the fear pass over my face, because she started to explain.

“I keep it under there ever since . . . ” She stopped herself. There were still some things we never talked about. She took a deep breath. “Ever since we left Dad.”

She leaned over and put it back under the bed. Then she kissed me hard and pushed every other thought away.

The next week I got a call from her.

“I can't do this anymore.”

I pleaded with her. “But I love you.”

I felt like I was dying.

“I love you, too. That's it; that's the problem. We know too much already. This would be it.
It
it. And if it ended, I would lose you forever. I can't do this.”

I curled into myself then. I stopped eating and I called in sick to work. I couldn't call in sick to work all week, though. One morning, on a rush-hour L train, I passed out. My eyes went fuzzy, and there was a thundering underwater noise in my head. It was so crowded that I never even fell down. I was vaguely aware of two men, who were inadvertently holding me up, pulling me out at the next stop and leaving me on a bench, then rushing to get back on the train before the doors closed. I woke up after a few minutes and took the opposite train home.