The Worst Years of Your Life (22 page)

“They're ruined,” I said. “Take them off.”

Jennifer took off her ballet slippers and peeled off her tights. She was wearing my old Underoos with superheroes on them, Spiderman and Superman and Batman all poking out from under a dirty dented tutu. I decided not to say anything, but it looked funny as hell to see a flat crotch in boys' underwear. I had the feeling they didn't bother making underwear for Ken because they knew it looked too weird on him.

I poured peroxide onto her bloody knees. Jennifer screamed into my ear. She bent down and examined herself, poking her purple fingers into the torn skin; her tutu bunched up and rubbed against her face, scraping it. I worked on her knees, removing little pebbles and pieces of grass from the area.

She started crying again.

“You're okay,” I said. “You're not dying.” She didn't care. “Do you want anything?” I asked, trying to be nice.

“Barbie,” she said.

It was the first time I'd handled Barbie in public. I picked her up like she was a complete stranger and handed her to Jennifer, who grabbed her by the hair. I started to tell her to ease up, but couldn't. Barbie looked at me and I shrugged. I went downstairs and made Jennifer one of my special Diet Cokes.

“Drink this,” I said, handing it to her. She took four giant gulps and immediately I felt guilty about having used a whole Valium.

“Why don't you give a little to your Barbie,” I said. “I'm sure she's thirsty too.”

Barbie winked at me and I could have killed her, first off for doing it in front of Jennifer, and second because she didn't know what the hell she was winking about.

I went into my room and put the piano away. I figured as long as I kept it in the original box I'd be safe. If anyone found it, I'd say it was a present for Jennifer.

W
EDNESDAY
Ken and Barbie had their heads switched. I went to get Barbie, and there on top of the dresser were Barbie and Ken, sort of. Barbie's head was on Ken's body and Ken's head was on Barbie. At first I thought it was just me.

“Hi,” Barbie's head said.

I couldn't respond. She was on Ken's body and I was looking at Ken in a whole new way.

I picked up the Barbie head/Ken and immediately Barbie's head rolled off. It rolled across the dresser, across the white doily past Jennifer's collection of miniature ceramic cats, and
boom
it fell to the floor. I saw Barbie's head rolling and about to fall, and then falling, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I was frozen, paralyzed with Ken's headless body in my left hand.

Barbie's head was on the floor, her hair spread out underneath it like angel wings in the snow, and I expected to see blood, a wide rich pool of blood, or at least a little bit coming out of her ear, her nose, or her mouth. I looked at her head on the floor and saw nothing but Barbie with eyes like the cosmos looking up at me. I thought she was dead.

“Christ, that hurt,” she said. “And I already had a headache from these earrings.”

There were little red dot/ball earrings jutting out of Barbie's ears.

“They go right through my head, you know. I guess it takes getting used to,” Barbie said.

I noticed my mother's pin cushion on the dresser next to the other Barbie/Ken, the Barbie body, Ken head. The pin cushion was filled with hundreds of pins, pins with flat silver ends and pins with red, yellow, and blue dot ball ends.

“You have pins in your head,” I said to the Barbie head on the floor.

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

I was starting to hate her. I was being perfectly clear and she didn't understand me.

I looked at Ken. He was in my left hand, my fist wrapped around his waist. I looked at him and realized my thumb was on his bump. My thumb was pressed against Ken's crotch and as soon as I noticed I got an automatic hard-on, the kind you don't know you're getting, it's just there. I started rubbing Ken's bump and watching my thumb like it was a large-screen projection of a porno movie.

“What are you doing?” Barbie's head said. “Get me up. Help me.” I was rubbing Ken's bump/hump with my finger inside his bathing suit. I was standing in the middle of my sister's room, with my pants pulled down.

“Aren't you going to help me?” Barbie kept asking. “Aren't you going to help me?”

In the second before I came, I held Ken's head hole in front of me. I held Ken upside down above my dick and came inside of Ken like I never could in Barbie.

I came into Ken's body and as soon as I was done I wanted to do it again. I wanted to fill Ken and put his head back on, like a perfume bottle. I wanted Ken to be the vessel for my secret supply. I came in Ken and then I remembered he wasn't mine. He didn't belong to me. I took him into the bathroom and soaked him in warm water and Ivory liquid. I brushed his insides with Jennifer's toothbrush and left him alone in a cold-water rinse.

“Aren't you going to help me, aren't you?” Barbie kept asking.

I started thinking she'd been brain damaged by the accident. I picked her head up from the floor.

“What took you so long?” she asked.

“I had to take care of Ken.”

“Is he okay?”

“He'll be fine. He's soaking in the bathroom.” I held Barbie's head in my hand.

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?” I said.

Did my little incident, my moment with Ken, mean that right then and there some decision about my future life as queerbait had to be made?

“This afternoon. Where are we going? What are we doing? I miss you when I don't see you,” Barbie said.

“You see me every day,” I said.

“I don't really see you. I sit on top of the dresser and if you pass by, I see you. Take me to your room.”

“I have to bring Ken's body back.”

I went into the bathroom, rinsed out Ken, blew him dry with my mother's blow dryer, then played with him again. It was a boy thing, we were boys together. I thought sometime I might play ball with him, I might take him out instead of Barbie.

“Everything takes you so long,” Barbie said when I got back into the room.

I put Ken back up on the dresser, picked up Barbie's body, knocked Ken's head off, and smashed Barbie's head back down on her own damn neck.

“I don't want to fight with you,” Barbie said as I carried her into my room. “We don't have enough time together to fight. Fuck me,” she said.

I didn't feel like it. I was thinking about fucking Ken and Ken being a boy. I was thinking about Barbie and Barbie being a girl. I was thinking about Jennifer, switching Barbie and Ken's heads, chewing Barbie's feet off, hanging Barbie from the ceiling fan, and who knows what else.

“Fuck me,” Barbie said again.

I ripped Barbie's clothing off. Between Barbie's legs Jennifer had drawn pubic hair in reverse. She drawn it upside down so it looked like a fountain spewing up and out in great wide arcs. I spit directly onto Barbie and with my thumb and first finger rubbed the ink lines, erasing them. Barbie moaned.

“Why do you let her do this to you?”

“Jennifer owns me,” Barbie moaned.

Jennifer owns me, she said, so easily and with pleasure. I was totally jealous. Jennifer owned Barbie and it made me crazy. Obviously it was one of those relationships that could only exist between women. Jennifer could own her because it didn't matter that Jennifer owned her. Jennifer didn't want Barbie, she had her.

“You're perfect,” I said.

“I'm getting fat,” Barbie said.

Barbie was crawling all over me, and I wondered if Jennifer knew she was a nymphomaniac. I wondered if Jennifer knew what a nymphomaniac was.

“You don't belong with little girls,” I said.

Barbie ignored me.

There were scratches on Barbie's chest and stomach. She didn't say anything about them and so at first I pretended not to notice. As I was touching her, I could feel they were deep, like slices. The edges were rough; my finger caught on them and I couldn't help but wonder.

“Jennifer?” I said massaging the cuts with my tongue, as though my tongue, like sandpaper, would erase them. Barbie nodded.

In fact, I thought of using sandpaper, but didn't know how I could explain it to Barbie:
you have to lie still and let me rub it really hard with this stuff that's like terry cloth dipped in cement.
I thought she might even like it if I made it into an S&M kind of thing and handcuffed her first.

I ran my tongue back and forth over the slivers, back and forth over the words “copyright 1966 Mattel Inc., Malaysia” tattooed on her back. Tonguing the tattoo drove Barbie crazy. She said it had something to do with scar tissue being extremely sensitive.

Barbie pushed herself hard against me, I could feel her slices rubbing my skin. I was thinking that Jennifer might kill Barbie. Without meaning to she might just go over the line and I wondered if Barbie would know what was happening or if she'd try to stop her.

We fucked, that's what I called it, fucking. In the beginning Barbie said she hated the word, which made me like it even more. She hated it because it was so strong and hard, and she said we weren't fucking, we were making love. I told her she had to be kidding.

“Fuck me,” she said that afternoon and I knew the end was coming soon. “Fuck me,” she said. I didn't like the sound of the word.

F
RIDAY
when I went into Jennifer's room, there was something in the air. The place smelled like a science lab, a fire, a failed experiment.

Barbie was wearing a strapless yellow evening dress. Her hair was wrapped into a high bun, more like a wedding cake than something Betty Crocker would whip up. There seemed to be layers and layers of angel's hair spinning in a circle above her head. She had yellow pins through her ears and gold fuck-me shoes that matched the belt around her waist. For a second I thought of the belt and imagined tying her up, but more than restraining her arms or legs, I thought of wrapping the belt around her face, tying it across her mouth.

I looked at Barbie and saw something dark and thick like a scar rising up and over the edge of her dress. I grabbed her and pulled the front of the dress down.

“Hey, big boy,” Barbie said. “Don't I even get a hello?”

Barbie's breasts had been sawed at with a knife. There were a hundred marks from a blade that might have had five rows of teeth like shark jaws. And as if that wasn't enough, she'd been dissolved by fire, blue and yellow flames had been pressed against her and held there until she melted and eventually became the fire that burned herself. All of it had been somehow stirred with the head of a pencil, the point of a pen, and left to cool. Molten Barbie flesh had been left to harden, black and pink plastic swirled together, in the crater Jennifer had dug out of her breasts.

I examined her in detail like a scientist, a pathologist, a fucking medical examiner. I studied the burns, the gouged-out area, as if by looking closely I'd find something, an explanation, a way out.

A disgusting taste came up into my mouth, like I'd been sucking on batteries. It came up, then sank back down into my stomach, leaving my mouth puckered with the bitter metallic flavor of sour saliva. I coughed and spit onto my shirt sleeve, then rolled the sleeve over to cover the wet spot.

With my index finger I touched the edge of the burn as lightly as I could. The round rim of her scar broke off under my finger. I almost dropped her.

“It's just a reduction,” Barbie said. “Jennifer and I are even now.”

Barbie was smiling. She had the same expression on her face as when I first saw her and fell in love. She had the same expression she always had and I couldn't stand it. She was smiling, and she was burned. She was smiling and she was ruined. I pulled her dress back up, above the scar line. I put her down carefully on the doily on top of the dresser and started to walk away.

“Hey,” Barbie said, “aren't we going to play?”

T
HE RHYTHM OF THE
S
CHWINN WAS THE RHYTHM OF MY
life, a soulful gliding pulse like Smokey Robinson in “Ooh Baby Baby”—that glottal skip, falsetto slide. The temperature had topped out at one hundred nine, faded to one-oh-four by dusk, would not drop into double figures all night long, heat rising from the asphalt, rising from the vacant desert lots, rippling up into the breathing air, smelling of tar, exhaust, exhaustion. Standing on the pedals, I rode a ribbon through the stalled traffic on Fourth Avenue, rolling up and down the concrete gutters, chugging to Smokey playing in my head, a song I didn't hear so much as perform, pumping hard, then coasting, the horizon going green on its way to black, shutting down for the night, dimming like a bad bulb, while the Schwinn, purple and chrome with a white banana seat, took me across the sweltering town, my T-shirt growing dark with sweat, hair standing thick with it, lips salty from it, on my way to see Karla Lowe, my girlfriend, the summer before high school, a quarter of a century ago.

Karla had an oval swimming pool in her backyard, and her mouth, when shaping her last name, took the precise contour of her pool. “Lowe,” I said aloud, tasting it like hard candy, leaning into a corner, my heart working its bump and throb, beating time with the Schwinn, with Smokey, with the bang and bang of being thirteen and being on my bike, Karla Lowe and her pool and her mouth like a pool waiting for me.

Her parents were out of town. I pictured the waters of her pool dark and turbulent, rainswept, as if a deep lake, a river jetty, a quarry some place where the powers of nature balanced out. Not that I was a stellar swimmer, not even a sound swimmer. I was a flail-and-thrash sort of swimmer—self-taught—a drowning sort of swimmer, but I could hold my breath a long time, longer than Lloyd Bridges, longer than Smokey embracing that “ooh” on the last note, and holding my breath, I would submerge, push off the rounded walls, traverse the pool beneath the surface, coasting, arms arching ahead, chest and hips in a slither, the water like air—a kind of flight.

From my house to Karla's, pumping hard: eighteen minutes, three erections. In the tall oleanders that concealed her yard, I hid my Schwinn, grime from the dirty leaves sticking to my slathered arms like dust to the screen of a lit TV. The music startled me, the fact of it, and the specific line, a black voice really doing it up:

Through a gap in the slats of the high cedar fence, I saw the shindig—big sister's party, seniors in high school shaking their hips by the pool, wearing bathing suits, making faces, twirling their arms like they'd seen on “American Bandstand,” while others lounged in the water around the pool's dark lip, sipping drinks, smiling, rolling their high-school eyes. Boys in polo shirts and swimming shorts crowded the keg on the covered patio, gesturing with their paper cups. A couple standing near the fence began to moan, the boy kissing the girl the way I wanted to kiss Karla, his hands roaming from her bare back to the bottom of her bikini, a single finger rimming the wrinkled elastic band.

I entered the yard through the gate. Karla was leaning against a white wrought-iron patio post, her green one-piece lapping up her body, two high-school boys—juniors, maybe seniors—hovering about her, leering like old men, touching her naked arm. She saw me come in, raised her dark brows as a greeting, didn't snub me, not exactly, just let me know she preferred the older boys—for the night, anyway. Which struck me as
why not,
as
okay,
as
fair enough.

I smiled, stared straight at her, smiled, and yanked off my shirt, stepped to the knobby rim of the oval pool, letting the round rise of the concrete press against my arches, then dove into the shallow water, disappeared beneath the surface, the night suddenly soundless, my arms aching ahead, chest and hips in a writhing glide, coasting, flying.

I came up in the deep end, still cutting through the water, angling toward the darkest corner of the pool, where two girls drank liquor and watched me slither near, ice tinkling in their glasses, shadows moving across their faces, watery light appearing beneath their eyes and vanishing.

“Who are you?” one asked me, her voice friendly, flirtatious, slightly slurred, slightly drunk.

I told her my name, coasting closer, just my name, my chin breaking the water, shadow and light riding my face, sliding up to them, bumping into them, my cheek suddenly against a girl's breast, my legs against their warm legs, my submerged body against their submerged bodies—a miscalculation, a boy just out of eighth grade staring at girls almost ready for college, an accident (sweet accident, brilliant mistake), which would have embarrassed me, but it made them laugh. They thought I'd done it on purpose.

“I know who you are,” the girl said, the girl whose breast my cheek had brushed. “You go to East High,” she said, her smile a piece of the moon, luminous and white, her wet hair pulled back, falling to her bare shoulders, the straps of her bathing suit loose and looping about her arms like exotic jewelry. “We go to Central,” she said. “You're on the basketball team, aren't you?”

“I was on the basketball team,” I said, which was true, but it was the junior-high team, the Woodard Termites, and I had been the tenth man on a ten-man team.

The other girl pulled herself from the pool, water cascading down her back and bottom, rippling the dark water. “I'll get us something more to drink,” she said, looking at me, brows pitched. “Jack on the rocks okay?”

“Sure,” I said, no idea what it meant. The space she emptied, I filled, as if her leaving created a current that sucked me over, a friendly tide. The girl's legs and mine rubbed together beneath the water, this girl I didn't know, maybe four years older than I, who might already have had sex, this girl, her legs against mine, her hair pulled back, her smile the moon. Then Smokey came over the stereo, “Ooh Baby Baby,” the song I'd been hearing all day, my song, and I put my hand inside the top of her bathing suit.

Never had I done anything like it before, and I didn't know why I did it then, currents of air guiding my hand.

“Someone will see,” she said but did nothing to remove it, smiling again, her hand gliding to my shoulder, touching the cut of my hair at the back of my neck.

Her breast was dimpled from the cool water, the nipple a pressure against the heart of my palm. I did not massage or squeeze her breast, but cupped it gently, as if to feel the rhythm of her heart, or to help her pledge allegiance. Smokey's voice soared, and I felt her knee lift, parting my legs. My face did not touch hers, but there was no space between us, her breathing urgent against my cheek—warm, moist breaths.

Then the other girl returned with our drinks. Squatting, she sat on the pool's concrete rim before letting her legs slide into the water. I removed my hand, took the glass. Without drinking, without tasting a drop on my tongue, I dipped beneath the surface and pushed off the wall, coasting through the water, away from them, the ice in the glass floating up against my shoulder as it drifted away. I let the glass sink slowly to the pool's blue bottom.

I surfaced at the other end. Karla was with just one boy now, her back against the white post, the boy leaning over her, his hand touching the taut skin along her neck.

“I think I'm going to leave,” I said and grabbed my shirt from the pool deck.

“See you,” said she.

I rode the Schwinn, the warm night black now, still triple figures, but I was cooled by my wet body, pumping hard, water from my hair running down my cheeks, evaporating, the road loaded with headlights that grew near, that illuminated me, then let me go. Meanwhile, the party played on, and Karla was led inside to her own bedroom, her own bed, the green one-piece making a wet mark on the carpet, an oval like the pool itself, like Karla's mouth when speaking her name, the summer before high school, twenty-five years ago.

And still I think I left at the right time, still I think swimming underwater with the drink was a good exit, and the girl, a woman now, must remember our few minutes in the dark of the pool with the same appreciative mystery that I do.

It is the one perfect moment in my life.