Maidenhead (7 page)

Wind cried through the ribs of the palm leaves. My dad turned on the TV. It was going to be that channel! I opened the screen door to come in and stop it. The channels were flipping.

No one could fucking look at me anymore. Because I got pissed on and slapped, called my mom a bitch and watched porn, my whole family hated me now.

GAYL: Nice, nice. Pornography and shame.

LEE: Listen, come on, it wasn’t her fault.

GAYL: Again with the fault. So whose fault was it?

LEE: It was Myra’s instinct to apologize to her family to make everything better and, like, she didn’t realize that that was the problem, not the piss, not the slap, not wanting to get fucked, not the porn. She wasn’t coming back from this trip as herself. She wasn’t coming back the same safe little person she left as. Her monstrous new face was a sign of that.

GAYL: Okay, fine. I’ll accept that for now.

§

It was my last chance to get outside before the taxi came to take us to the airport. I had on a big straw hat and Jody’s Sophia Loren glasses. My mom didn’t try to stop me from leaving but she handed me her watch. Twenty minutes, she said without looking at me. We’d eat dinner at the airport. We had two flights to get home. The sun was still hours from going down. My cheek felt like matches were being struck and lit against it. But it occurred to me as I left the four of them packing that I was now free of my mother’s desire for my life to be safe.

I walked to that woman’s store in the alley, freaked out the whole time that I was going run into him. The bird woman sat on the same little stool outside, in the same pounds of turquoise. She stood up when I went in through the beaded curtains saying hi, but she didn’t come in after me. The walls of the shop were cherry-coloured. Dark wood bookshelves with angels carved at the top were packed with trinkets and blankets. Mobiles of birds made of gold-painted paper hung all over the ceiling. Her shop smelled the same as his room. I was wearing big sunglasses and a hat but I knew she recognized me.

The woman didn’t come inside the store for a while. There were these coral and beaded necklaces at the cash, pinned in a glass box like specimens. I just wanted that woman to tell me if that guy had a contagious disease. I knew her slap wouldn’t cause all this swelling. I would not be able to go back to school looking like this.

‘You want some help, sweetheart?’ The woman was suddenly behind me.

I realized that people call each other names during sex to turn themselves on.

I knew the woman could see how ballooned and red my cheek was even though I was almost all covered up.

‘Try this on,’ the woman said. She opened up the door of the specimen box and held up a spiky necklace that had some turquoise in the collar part.

‘No thanks,’ I said.

Did I contract some kind of contagious disease from his piss?

The woman bent down below the glass box and rummaged around. She was rustling through tissue paper, stacked boxes. Then she held up a necklace with a plain leather strap. It had a tiny black pendant in a teardrop shape. It had red and green and yellow stripes.

‘This is malachite,’ she said.

Before I could think to say no or yes or whatever, she was putting it on me. She was touching my hair, lifting it up to fasten the clasp. It was really tight at my throat.

‘This is a good one for young women,’ she said. The black pendant felt like a bone. ‘It’s protection.’

The woman brought me over to a full-length mirror and I looked at myself with the necklace on. I wasn’t looking so much at the necklace as I was looking at her trying to diagnose me. Jody was just like, ‘You’ll go see Dr. Bernhard at home. It’ll get better.’ My dad especially seemed unconcerned. ‘No big deal,’ he said, one-upping Jody. My mom got mad at him when he said that. ‘Not to you,’ she hissed.

‘This necklace is a very powerful talisman against violence,’ the woman said, fingering the teardrop, then laying it back down softly on my neck.

Why’d she think I needed a talisman against violence? I needed protection against disease from blowing into one of your fucking ocarinas!

‘It’s forty-five dollars. A special piece, handmade,’ the woman said.

‘I don’t have any money on me.’ I gave away my money to that fucking woman and him.

The woman sneaked behind the cash and set a prickly, long-limbed plant on the counter. ‘You should put some of this on your cheek,’ she said. ‘It’s very healing for whatever’s going on under there.’

The woman tapped her chest, which was covered with turquoise. There was New Age music playing. I put my hand on the black bone necklace. The woman used an X-acto knife to cut off a piece of the plant. There was see-through cream dripping from where she cut. She squeezed some of it on her fingers and tried to touch my cheek. No fucking way, I pulled away. The woman held out the plant piece to me. It looked like a headless lizard, I thought. I took some of the oozing. It was cool. It felt all right.

‘Three times a day,’ the woman said. ‘No more sun.’

‘I’m leaving, anyway,’ I said.
Bitch.

‘My name is Olinda.’ She was smiling tightly. ‘I’m going to give you a deal on the necklace.’

Olinda went behind the counter again. She put the lizard plant in a paper bag.

I took off my sunglasses and hat. I actually wanted this bitch’s opinion: is getting slapped by a stranger what you mean by violence? I didn’t know what the fuck a talisman was.

Olinda didn’t look shocked that I had a huge swollen rash, a contagious disease. I wanted to ask her why she thought I needed protection. I knew that that was going to torment me at home. Jen wouldn’t know, Jody wouldn’t know, Dr. Bernhard wouldn’t know either. No one would know why I needed protection.

‘You can pay me by mail, if you’d like,’ Olinda said.

All of a sudden I felt panic, because I really didn’t want to see Elijah again, especially looking like this. Maybe he was going to walk right in, maybe pass by on his way to dinner with her. I put my hat and sunglasses back on. I don’t know if Olinda knew I was freaking out. My cheek felt redder with that ooze from the plant. It was like I had shellac on top of fresh hives.

‘I don’t have any money,’ I said. ‘I have to go now. We’re leaving in half an hour.’

‘You can just send it. I trust you. You are ... ?’

‘Myra.’

‘Ahhh ... ’ Olinda’s face creased, connecting all of her features. ‘
I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess ...
’

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

Olinda made me write down my address and email for her on a brown paper bag. She stood too close. I felt the stink of incense. My cheek started to sting. Then she gave me one of her cards, slid her arm through mine and walked me to the hanging beads. I wondered how she ever locked her store at night because there was no door.

‘You’re a very sensitive person.’ Olinda leaned into me like she was my age. Her lipstick was cracking. She was probably younger than my mother but she had way more wrinkles from being in the sun. She lifted the brim of my hat. Her lips touched my forehead.

‘Key West is a darkly spiritual neighbourhood.’ Her voice was tinny, like it could travel directly into my brain. ‘A lot of souls, like your lover, have landed here.’

I felt tight. He is not my lover, I wanted to scream. He’s a macho creep with a bleeding fucking girlfriend!

‘I think you know what I mean.’ Olinda’s lips were still under the brim of my hat. ‘You’ve got the look that attracts them.’

I dropped the paper bag that she gave me on purpose. I had to crouch down away from her to get it. What fucking look? What look did I have? I stood up a few feet backwards, outside. The alleyway walls were white and scribbled on.

‘And you’re innocent,’ Olinda laughed. ‘Not like these Spring Break sluts. So they like that even better.’

Fuck you fuck you fuck you, bitch! Do you even know what happened to me? That guy Elijah doesn’t like me, he hates me. He didn’t even want to have sex with me! He has a girlfriend and she slapped me so hard.

I ran out of Olinda’s store with the brown paper bag, the headless plant. My cheek burned like it was peeling off. I didn’t want to be innocent. I wanted to be a slut like those girls in that porno! I did. I swear. I wished I wished I wished I was a slut. God, why’d that woman slap my face? Why didn’t he do anything?

I couldn’t believe I had to go home like this, on a plane like this: the ugliest virgin in the world. I was going to have to see Jen and Charlene like this. Maybe this urge to lie to Jen, to be jealous of her, maybe she wasn’t really my friend. Jen, Charlene, all of them. Maybe I shouldn’t have any friends and maybe that’d be easier. Maybe I should just find some guy to fuck, someone who likes an ugly red cheek. I should wear see-through high heels and swap sperm with a girl.

At the airport Jody asked me where I’d gotten the necklace. I told her I’d found it in the sand but she didn’t believe me.

‘You know what those colours mean, right?’

‘Of course I know,’ I snapped. My father looked over, he heard my tone. Jeff had his head in my mother’s lap. Both of my parents were headached and done.

‘Rastafari,’ Jody whispered. ‘You don’t know what a Rastafarian is, do you?’

Jody touched my necklace and I could tell that she liked it. Some guy at school had given her a Bob Marley dvd. Jody said that Rastafarianism was a religion of peace and that it was kind of like Judaism, but from Jamaica. She said that Rastafarians worship Jah. ‘It’s like the name Eli-JAH, right? Or Hallelu-JAH. Get it? It’s their word for God. It comes from Hebrew.’

My stomach felt twisted. Elijah, God. My mother didn’t look like she’d been on vacation. Her face was pale, her mouth downturned. I asked Jody if she knew what a talisman was.

‘Magical protection against evil.’ She knew, of course. ‘It’s an African thing. A talisman is something you have on you like a little arrowhead or something. It’s supposed to break into pieces, like, if you’re actually in danger.’

My mother got sick on the airplane, drinking coffee after coffee. Jody let me keep her sunglasses on the whole time.

I hoped this tight black Rastafarian necklace was a talisman against violence. Because now I felt monstrous and violent. I could not be mothered at all anymore.

Make-Believe

H
ello to the Angel I met on the beach. I have been thinking about Canada. I have never been to Canada. Send me a picture. I miss your sweet face.

My sweet face was still knobbed on one side like a toad’s. The email came from that woman’s store, [email protected]. I didn’t write back because I wasn’t sure what to say. The next message came for me six hours later.

The beautiful thing about you, Angel, is that you don’t even know how beautiful you are. Don’t ever take off the necklace I made for you.

He made me the necklace? It occurred to me that he was going to leave that woman to come up here to me. He was thinking about Canada. He made me the necklace. The talisman!

Okay tell me when you want to come, I wrote back. Oh my god, thank you for the necklace!

There was a knock at my door. I shut down the computer. It was both my parents together.