Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (10 page)

"How will I know you?"

"I'll be wearing lace panties and a garter belt,” you tell her.

"Okay,” Janice says. “Look for my throbbing organ."

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After writing all night, I awoke to find scorpions in the shoes of my sentences.

So I went barefoot.

Later, the scorpions became words, almost—phonetic with exoskeleton, grasping and pinching, stinging at the world with interrogatives.

Later still, scorpions and shoes became sentences about scorpions, shoes and sentences.

It's hard to write with pincers, hard to type with shoes on the feet of my hands, hard to love you the way I do when you keep mistaking the shape of my body in profile for a rhetorical question and I desperately need

your answer.

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Matthew Kirby

Mary sat down at the table and took off her glasses. She noticed how loose the hinges were and how oily the edges of the lenses had become. She was so tired as she sat there with her legs spread and her cheek pressed against the cool, sticky, fake-wood surface of the table. She lined her eye up through one of the lenses and saw the hills and the distorted trees through the cafeteria window.

A student came and sat down across from her. He had a beard, like so many of the guys at the college. He also had a white, cable-knit sweater in the Irish style. There was something bad smelling about him, she noticed as she sat up straighter and pulled her glasses back on. She saw his plate and saw that it contained two chops of pork in brown onion sauce and mashed potatoes glistening with margarine. He was such a college boy. For a strange, graceless moment she wanted to kiss him. The idea left her mind quickly, however. She got up and as she pushed her chair in it made squeaking noises on the cafeteria floor.

That made the guy look up.

"You can stay.” He looked at her. “I didn't mean for you to leave."

"Okay.” She obeyed him on a whim, this stranger. She sat back down as noisily as she had gotten up. “If you don't mind me lying here eyeing you as you eat those chops.” The guy chewed, thoughtfully. His face was bumpy. There were a few drops of brown gravy in his beard that sparkled as he chewed.

"Do you want me to get you a plate of food?” he asked her. She was on her break.

"No. Get me tea. Hot, healing tea.” He did it. He went and got her a pale tea bag, a wedge of lemon and a cup of steaming water on a saucer. He laid these items down professionally beside her reclining head.

"Thank you, my boy,” Mary said.

"My name's Guy."

"Ha.” She said the word rather than laughed. “Your name is really Guy?"

"Yes."

"Are you British or something? Old world?"

"No,” Guy said, cutting the rest of his remaining chop into small, equally sized parts. “My parents wanted to be missionaries when I was born. They thought they were going to Guyana. Hence ‘Guy.'” Mary didn't exactly laugh but made an exasperated snort that could be passed off as laughter. People's stupidity no longer surprised her in this place.

"Yes. It's pretty terrible,” Guy said humorlessly. Quickly, Mary reached across the table and grabbed his hairy wrist. There was a fork in his hand and a piece of pork chop on the fork. His mouth was open, a dark hole.

"Come to my dorm room,” she whispered.

Nobody called them dorm rooms. They were staff housing, one-story apartments with real wood siding in the clearing at the base of the athletic field. Mary and Guy had vigorous sex and afterwards Guy leaned up against the wall with a blank, satisfied expression on his face while Mary squatted at the edge of the bed and used five tissues to thoroughly drain herself. The sight of his wide, naked legs draped across the bed sheets that she had washed the day before bugged her.

"What are you still doing here, Guy?” She threw the bundle of his clothing onto his crotch to cover the sight of him. He reached out and touched her nude hip. She brushed his hand away and immediately pulled on her jeans and then a sweater out of the basket although it was dirty. Finally, Guy stood up and yawned. Mary winced as a drop of semen fell from the tip of his red penis onto her carpet. He didn't seem to notice. He was still pretty young beneath his beard. “This is my room,” she told him firmly. “You cannot just walk around naked in someone else's room with someone else's things in it.” He started coming towards her as if he was going to embrace her and then, apparently, changed his mind. He pulled on his underwear and jeans and sat down in a corduroy armchair, abstractedly, with no shirt on.

"Are you posing? Fuck, Guy are you...” Mary stopped talking and took some cigarettes out of her jacket. She put on shoes, socks, and walked out of her apartment, ignoring the young student inside and even locking the door behind her. She headed out into the middle of the athletic field where the grass was green and the boundaries newly demarcated in white lime.

These, as far as I can tell and with some embellishments, were the circumstances of my conception. Now, you're probably thinking that Guy was never heard from again and my mother put me through college by the sweat of her brow and that this is the story of why and how I became a lesbian. Not so. Guy put his shirt back on but he never left my mother's apartment; at least never for very long. The next day he brought her tea on her lunch break, setting down the saucer and lemon wedge carefully just like before.

"You've got to be kidding me."

"I'm not kidding you, Mary, nor am I trying to have sex with you again. I feel guilty like I ... like I've committed an insult against your womanhood.” Mary fixed her eyes on the drop ceiling and laughed.

"Oh, Guy!” Then she noticed a slightly sour smell. Same as the day before.

"Don't you bathe?"

Guy looked down into his lap shyly. It was a suddenly feminine gesture and took Mary by surprise.

"Never mind.” She squeezed the lemon wedge over her tea.

To make a long story short, Mary was touched by this weird-smelling guy who often got condiments stuck in his beard. For the next nine months they had lunch together and abstained from sex on Guy's initiative. When I was born, Guy revealed he was fairly well off, the son of one of the college's founding families, and he and Mary were married. His family, however, promptly cut him off because of his indiscretion and Guy dropped out of college. The young couple gathered their worldly possessions and set out for New York City, New York. Two weeks later they were living in a trailer in deep New Jersey. I remember that place. I lived there until I was eleven. It was my childhood home.

Maybe it was because my parents had no real honeymoon, no pre-child sex life, that they developed the disturbing habit of hanging out around the house naked. The three of us would gather in front of our ten inch, black and white television like that—me, also naked; and blonde as I learned from childhood photos. What's even worse is that I can remember those immodest days clearly since they lasted up until I was about eleven years old. When summer was fading, I was always the first to complain about the draft and Guy would open up the steamer trunk and hand me my rumpled, corduroy overalls which I would don right there in front of him, greedily.

The only other family in the trailer park, the Dawses, didn't seem to care about our nakedness, which I'm sure they saw every once in a while since our blinds were always falling down. Mary had become really lazy; too lazy to put them back up, and I think Guy wanted the blinds to fall. I suspect he wanted the Dawses to see. Maybe the Dawses liked to see. It was a possibility. I think it's time I clarify something: this is not a story about a trailer park.

There were two little Dawses, Clem and Rhina, and two parent Dawses who we rarely saw. Rhina was my age, my height, my sex and Clem was older by two years. When Rhina came over, my parents, thankfully, put on shorts and my mother, a halter top; but I was encouraged to play naked because I was still young and, according to Guy, should have been innocent. Rhina wore clothes like a regular person and sometimes, with her help, I could get the steamer trunk open so I could wear some too.

Our favorite place to play was the aluminum steps that came down from the outside of the kitchen door, which was never opened and was blocked by the refrigerator inside. We played step ball, a game that consisted of hurling a blue rubber ball at the steps and seeing where it would bounce. The primary thrill of step ball lay in standing as close as you could to the steps so that the ball might or might not bounce back and hit you in the face. This never failed to cause Rhina and I to laugh loudly in terror. The secondary thrill of step ball was that sometimes the ball would roll under the trailer and one of us, usually the one who had thrown it, would have to crawl after it ... in the dark, with the bugs. If it went too far underneath the trailer we would have to go and get Clem, who was not afraid of bugs or darkness. Clem would take his shirt off to squeeze into the narrowest crevice, digging into the dirt with the tips of his cowboy boots to push himself forward. I liked Clem. Afterwards he would stand before me, his face smeared with mud and with tiny rocks clinging to his chest and hand me the ball.

"Thank you Clem,” I would say in my sweetest, most grateful voice, but he was a shy boy and would walk away quickly, with his head down, smiling strangely.

Sometimes Rhina and I played another game and that was digging in the dirt with Rhina's dolls, an activity we referred to as “trench-dig.” We used their sharp feet and long plastic legs to make a network of trenches around the corner from the steps. It was during an afternoon of trench-dig that I had my first sexual experience. It was high summer still and, as usual, I was in the nude. Rhina had just dug an exceptionally deep trench and rolled some of the excess dirt together in her palms to form a little ball, which she inserted between my legs.

"It's poop,” she said. I left the little ball of dirt in there until I went to bed that night because I didn't want Rhina to think I didn't understand. Maybe that doesn't count as a “sexual experience,” but then, this is not a coming of age story, so never mind.

Like I said, our family's nude period went on for eleven years. In the tenth year, my dad completed his master's degree and got a job teaching a writing workshop at Seton Hall College. The legitimacy of being a college-level instructor must have had an effect on him, because one evening he came home from work and kept his clothes on all night except to take a shower. Soon, Mary followed suit and I, gratefully, took my corduroy overalls out of the steamer trunk for good. Without a word, the nude period was over.

Guy was at the college from after lunch until eight at night and my mother kept her job as a hostess at a nearby Shoney's. She worked the three to midnight shift, so, from three to eight, I was technically on my own. My mother and father justified leaving me at the trailer because Mary's Shoney's was only a ten-minute walk across the highway and Mr. Daws was always at home next door if I needed help. He had a disability and was very kind. Anyway, I was perfectly happy to be by myself. Most days I just watched TV and waited for Rhina to get home. Sometimes I drew pictures of the characters I saw on television. Gesture drawings. Mary had taught me how to do this because she said I was a natural and that art was like any other muscle: use it or lose it.

Once I was drawing a gesture drawing of a man named McHale who was in a show about his navy. I drew him walking rapidly through the galley with a plate of food that looked like dumplings. When I looked up from my drawing, Clem, Rhina's older brother, was standing there. There were no locks on the doors and sometimes Rhina came in unannounced, but never Clem. He was wearing cowboy boots and jeans and had no shirt on. His body was thin and exceedingly brown because he had played outside nearly every day that summer.

Now there was something unsettling about the way Clem was standing and looking at me with his head tilted to one side and his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans. He was smiling a little but it was a slightly mean smile. I tried to smile too to show that I was not surprised by his presence. I only ended up feeling awkward, somehow naked again although I had my overalls on.

"Get out of here Clem,” I said, but even as I was speaking I knew that it was not going to be so easy to get him to leave. He stood in front of me with his arms on his hips and I watched his tight, tan belly rise and fall. When he came and stood directly in front of where I sat, I could smell him and he smelled like the outdoors, like grass and dirt and insects. I noticed another thing about Clem: there was something swelling in the crotch of his jeans. He giggled when he noticed me noticing that.

"I guess you want to know what I have in my jeans.” No, actually. I do not recall wanting to know. I was scared. But Clem was intent on showing me whatever he had in there. I remember the dirt under his fingernails and in the cracks of his fingers as he pulled the zipper down. Behind him the television program was over and there was a commercial for ponies with real hair you could comb. He was pulling aside the two halves of his jeans. There was something moving—it looked like it was crawling—under the white cloth of his underwear.

It was a locust. He pulled apart the white halves of his underwear and a locust crawled out and plopped down onto the carpet. Clem was still smiling. There were so many things about the Daws children that I didn't understand. There was still something moving there in the hole in Clem's underwear. It was more locusts. They started coming out of that hole and plopping onto the carpet, one after another, then crawling around hungrily. I guess I could have gotten up but I didn't think of it at the time. I just sat there, holding the edges of my sketchbook as more and more locusts crawled out of Clem's jeans. One fat one landed on my knee. It had strange markings, kind of like a funny human face—an old man's. I brushed it off onto the carpet where it looked up at me from among the others.