Towelhead (22 page)

“Okay,” I said, even though I was pretty sure I wouldn't do that.

“Your dad seems nice,” she said, dropping her duffel bag on the floor and sitting down on the edge of my bed.

I set my bag next to hers, then sat down on the floor beside it. “He's not that nice.”

“Why not?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. He gets mad sometimes.”

“So?” Denise said. “My dad does, too.”

I wasn't sure what to say. I couldn't tell if Denise's dad got mad in the same way mine did.

“They get over it, though,” she said.

“I guess,” I said, even though I was pretty sure Daddy had never gotten over anything.

“My dad does this thing where he introduces himself to the waitress every time we go to a restaurant. He's like, ‘Hi, my name is Porter and this is my daughter, Denise. What's your name?' I hate it. It's so embarrassing.”

I nodded. I tried to think of something embarrassing that Daddy did, but I couldn't. It actually seemed like it would be kind of fun, if he were to do something embarrassing.

“Plus, he talks really loud,” Denise said. “He's like, ‘HI, MY NAME IS PORTER AND THIS IS MY DAUGHTER, DENISE. WHAT'S YOUR NAME?' He has a hearing aid in his right ear.”

“Oh,” I said.

“At least your dad isn't deaf.”

“Yeah,” I said. Suddenly, though, I felt disappointed. Like I wished Denise wasn't there. She just didn't seem to be understanding what I was trying to tell her about Daddy. I wasn't even sure what I was trying to tell her. Mostly I just didn't want her to like him so much when she didn't even know him. “Is your dad a racist?” I asked.

“What?”

“A racist,” I said again.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“My dad is.”

She frowned a little. “Really?”

I nodded. “He said I couldn't go out with Thomas anymore because it would ruin my reputation.”

“You're kidding.”

“Nope.”

“But your dad is an Arab.”

“I know.”

“He's a minority, too.”

“It ruined my mother's reputation for her to go out with Daddy, and now he doesn't want mine to get ruined by going out with Thomas.”

“Geez,” Denise said.

“I miss Thomas a lot,” I told her.

“I guess I noticed you two haven't been hanging out as much.”

“He's mad at me because I'm following my father's rules.”

“I'd be mad at you, too.”

“You would?”

“Definitely,” she said. “Your father is wrong. So if you do what he says, then you're wrong, too. You're a racist, too.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You don't understand,” I said. “If I don't do what he says, he'll send me back to live with my mother.”

“So?”

“I don't want to live with my mother.”

“Wouldn't you rather live with her than be a racist?”

“No,” I said.

“I would,” Denise said.

“I can't leave Houston,” I said. “Ever.”

“Why not?”

I thought for a second, then told her the truth. “I'm in love with someone.”

“Thomas?” she asked.

“No. Mr. Vuoso.”

“Who's that?”

“The reservist. Who I interviewed.”

“Oh.”

“How would you feel if you had to move away from Mr. Joffrey?” I said.

“I guess I wouldn't like it,” she said.

“See?”

“Does he like you, too?” Denise asked. “Mr. Vuoso?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

I wasn't sure how to answer that question. Finally I said, “Because he took me out for dinner.”

“Really?” Denise said. “Like on a date?”

I nodded.

“Wow,” she said. “Where was your dad?”

“At his girlfriend's.”

Denise sighed. “You're so lucky. I wish Mr. Joffrey would take me on a date.”

“You can't tell anyone what I just told you,” I said.

“Of course not,” she said.

“Mr. Vuoso could get in trouble.”

Denise nodded. “He could get in big trouble.”

“I'd definitely have to go live with my mother then,” I said.

“Don't worry,” Denise said. “I don't want you to go and live with your mom. Then I wouldn't have any friends!”

She smiled at me, and I wondered if that was really true, that I was her only friend.

Daddy knocked on the door then and asked if we wanted to go see a movie. It was called
Vincent & Theo,
and we sat across the aisle from Daddy so it would seem like we were there on our own. The movie was about the painter Vincent van Gogh and his brother, Theo, who took care of him. I think Daddy thought it would be educational, but it turned out that there were a lot of scenes where naked ladies posed for Vincent. Whenever this happened, Denise started to laugh. “Shh!” I told her, worried that Daddy would hear her and think it was me.

In the car on the way home, he said, “I had no idea there would be nudity in that film. I apologize, Denise.”

“Oh, I don't care,” she said.

“Your parents might care.”

“No, they won't. They only care about violence. Not sex.”

“Well,” Daddy said, “maybe I should call and tell them anyway.”

“I'm telling you, don't worry about it!” Denise said, and she laughed.

I thought Daddy would get mad to have a girl my age talking to him like that, but he didn't. He said, “Okay. Whatever you say.”

It kind of bugged me, how Denise was allowed to act like that and I wasn't. Even if I started to act like her right now, I knew Daddy would get mad at me and tell me to cut it out. I knew it was too late for me to try something new with him.

Back at home, Mr. Vuoso was out in his yard, taking his flag down. “Is that him?” Denise asked me.

“Who?” Daddy said.

I didn't know what to say. I couldn't believe she was telling my secret already. Then she realized what she had done and caught herself.

“The reservist guy,” Denise said, “who Jasira interviewed.”

Daddy nodded. Then he looked at me through the rearview mirror and said, “Jasira, I want to hear that tape when we get inside.”

“What tape?” Denise asked.

“The interview tape,” he said.

“You can't listen to Jasira's tape!” she said.

“No?” Daddy said. He looked at her like he thought she had said something cute. “Why not?”

“Because,” Denise said. “She's a journalist. Her sources are confidential. If you listen to that tape, you're breaking her confidentiality.”

“Oh,” Daddy said. “I see.”

I couldn't believe it, that he believed Denise about confidentiality, but not me.

“You'll have to wait for the article to come out,” Denise told him.

“But that's too long,” Daddy said.

“Well,” Denise said, “that's just too bad.”

“This is a tough friend,” Daddy said, looking at me in the rearview mirror again, and I nodded.

That night, after eating some of our junk food, Denise and I worked on her horoscopes. For Daddy's sign, Capricorn, she wrote:
Something very bad is going to happen to you if you don't shape up! Be nicer to other people and don't be a racist. Life will improve for you if you change your ways.
For Mr. Joffrey's horoscope, Cancer, she put:
You will fall in love with a beautiful woman who is just as smart as you but much younger. Try to give her a chance. You might be surprised!

“What if it's a woman reading the horoscope?” I asked Denise.

“What?” she said.

“Then it's a woman falling in love with a woman.”

“Oh,” she said, “right,” and she changed
woman
to
person
. She worried that it sounded too vague in terms of the message she wanted to send to Mr. Joffrey, but then she agreed that the other way was just too weird.

That night, I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor, while Denise slept in my bed. I thought about showing her my
Playboy
before we turned the light off, but then I changed my mind. I worried that she might think it was gross, like Melina did.

In the morning, Daddy made us pancakes. It was taking a long time for Denise to compliment him on how good they were, so finally I asked her, “Do you like the pancakes?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “They're great.”

“They're the best ones I've ever had,” I said.

She nodded, then took another bite. I looked over at Daddy, who was standing at the stove with his apron on, but I couldn't tell if he'd heard us.

Denise's mom came to get her at eleven. She rang the doorbell and introduced herself to Daddy and me, then complimented us on the Persian cyclamen we'd planted out front. Daddy got his scissors then and cut her a small bouquet. After Denise and her mom had pulled away in their car, we went back inside the house. As soon as he'd closed the door, Daddy said, “Okay, give me the tape.”

“What?” I said.

“I want to hear that tape.”

“But you told Denise you would wait for the article to come out.”

“I did not. She told me I would have to wait, and I said that was too long.”

I looked at him.

“Give it to me,” he said.

I went in my bedroom and got it. There was nothing else I could do. When I came back, Daddy was standing in the informal living room, where the stereo system was. I gave him the cassette, and he put it in the tape deck. He stood next to the stereo while it played, like he was guarding it or something.

When the first part came on, about the gas masks, he laughed a lot. “Good for you!” he said. “You really gave it to him.” When the part about the condoms came on, he didn't say anything. Then there was the sound of Mr. Vuoso turning the tape recorder off, then the sound of the tape recorder coming back on again, and me asking only decent questions. That was when Daddy hit Stop. “What did I just miss?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Why did the tape turn off?”

“Mr. Vuoso got mad that I asked him that question. He hit Stop.”

“Then what happened?”

“He asked how I knew about his condoms.”

“How did you know?”

“I found them in his duffel bag.”

“You must be kidding me.”

I shook my head.

“What kind of person goes through another person's things?”

I didn't answer.

“Do you go through my things, too? When I'm not here?”

“No,” I said.

“Condoms,” Daddy said, shaking his head. “You have a foul mouth and a foul mind.” He came over and slapped me across my mouth then, like he was trying to fix that one part of me. When I pulled away, he grabbed my arm and squeezed hard. That hurt worse than the slap. With my arm, it was like the blood pressure cuff at the doctor's, when you think your arm will burst, but then the nurse releases the little valve, and you wonder how she knew to do it at the exact right moment. Except Daddy didn't let go.

In the morning, there were purple marks on my arm that were the same size as Daddy's fingertips. I put on a long-sleeve shirt and went and sat down at the breakfast table. Daddy had already started his Cheerios. “May I please have my tape?” I asked. “I need to transcribe it for my article.”

“No,” he said. “It's my tape now.”

“But what about my interview?”

He shrugged. “You can interview me.”

“I don't want to interview you.”

He stopped eating and looked at me. “Fine. Don't.”

We finished our cereal and I watched Daddy drink the milk from the bottom of his bowl. When he was finished, he got up and took his dishes to the sink. He rinsed them out with only water, then put them in the drainer. He didn't know that when I came home after school every day, I always rewashed them with soap.

I
wrote the interview with Mr. Vuoso anyway. I still had all my questions on a piece of paper, and rereading them helped me to remember his answers. Sometimes, when I couldn't remember, I made up something that I thought he might've said. Like for the question “Can you receive packages in Iraq?” I made him say, “Yes, I can. When family, friends, and neighbors send packages, it helps me to know that people are thinking about me back home.” At the end, when the interview was a little too short, I added a question: “What would you say to people who love Saddam?” “Well,” I made Mr. Vuoso say, “I would tell them to look out, because I have my eye on them.”

“Good ending,” Charles said, when I showed him the interview on Monday, and I said thank you.

At lunch that day, I told Thomas what I had done. “Are you trying to impress me or something?” he asked. It was spaghetti day, and he had red sauce at the corners of his mouth.

“Yes,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I'm not impressed.”

“What would impress you?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It's too late. You can never impress me again.” He stuck a forkful of twirled spaghetti in his mouth.

Later, between classes, I stopped at Denise's locker to tell her about my conversation with Thomas. “He won't even give me a second chance,” I said.

“Can you blame him?” she asked.

“I guess not.”

Denise had a small round mirror on the inside of her locker door, and after checking herself in it, she reached in her purse and pulled out a small square of waxy-looking paper. She pressed it to her forehead, and when she pulled it away, it was clear with makeup grease. “Eww,” she said, showing it to me.

“I'm not a racist,” I said. “I don't care what you and Thomas say. I have to do what my father tells me.”

“Why?” Denise asked.

“I just do.”

“What if you don't?”

“He'll get mad.”

“So?”

“He's really mean when he gets mad.”

“I already told you,” she said, “he'll get over it.”

“No he won't,” I said. “You don't know him.”

“Just don't act so afraid of him.”

“I can't help it.”

“Pretend he's a dog,” she said. “You know how you're not supposed to act afraid of dogs because they can smell fear?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “it's the same with your father. If you just ignore him, he'll leave you alone.”

I felt really bad for the rest of the day, like it was my own fault that Daddy got mad at me. Like it would never happen if I would just act in some certain way. Maybe Denise was right, but the problem was, I didn't know how to act the way she was describing.

Even so, I tried to practice being a little braver that night while we sat with our TV trays, watching the war. Colin Powell was giving a press conference on CNN, and it was making Daddy madder and madder. He talked a lot about Colin Powell's unsuitability for the job of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Why is he unsuitable?” I asked. It had begun to occur to me that Daddy didn't like him because he was black.

“What do you mean, ‘Why is he unsuitable?' Look at him! He wants to take Saddam home with him and tuck him into bed all safe and sound!”

“But why is he unsuitable for the job?”

“I just told you,” Daddy said.

“But he's very smart.”

“How do you know? Did you meet him?”

“No.”

“Then shut it.”

I tried to think of something else to say so it wouldn't seem like I was afraid to talk when Daddy told me not to, but I couldn't. Anyway, I didn't really care about being brave anymore. When Daddy told you to shut up, it was a kind of gift. A promise that he wouldn't hit you if you stopped talking right now. It just didn't make sense to ignore it.

At lunch the next day, Thomas said, “I thought of something you could do to impress me.”

“What?” I asked. It was hamburger day and I was tearing open a plastic packet of mustard.

“Have sex with me.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Really?” he said. For the first time in a long while, he sounded kind of friendly.

“Yes.”

“Great,” he said. “When?”

“Whenever you want.”

“Well,” he said, “I guess we need to figure out a place first.”

“We can't do it at my house,” I said. I couldn't risk Mr. Vuoso and Zack telling on me again.

Thomas nodded. “We can do it at my house.”

“What about your parents?” I asked.

“They'll be at work.”

“What if they come home?”

“They won't. They never come home early.”

“I'll have to walk home,” I said.

“You can take a taxi,” Thomas said. “I'll pay for it.”

I thought about this, then said, “All right.”

“Can we do it today?” he asked.

“Do you have a condom?”

“No.”

“Then we'll have to wait until tomorrow. I have one at home I can bring.”

“Where'd you get it?”

“From Mr. Vuoso's duffel bag.”

“I don't want to use that racist's condom.”

“You have to,” I said. “It's the only one we have.”

He said okay, even though he seemed kind of bothered.

When I met Denise at her locker later and told her about my deal with Thomas, she said, “No way! He's using you!”

“No, he's not,” I said.

“He's totally using you. You can't have sex with him in exchange for not being a racist. That's ridiculous.”

“But I want to have sex with him.”

She looked at me. “You never told me that. You told me you were in love with that guy next door.”

“I am,” I said, “but I want to have sex with Thomas, too.”

“Then you won't be a virgin anymore.”

“So?” I said.

“So?” she said. “It's important that the first person you have sex with is someone special. Not someone who's using you.”

“Well,” I said, “I'm probably going to do it.”

“I can't believe you,” she said, and she closed her locker and walked away. I thought about chasing after her and telling her not to worry, that I already wasn't a virgin, that the person I had done it with was special, even if he had only become that way later on. But I didn't, of course. Besides the fact that I didn't want to get Mr. Vuoso in trouble, I didn't think Denise would understand. If I couldn't explain to her why Daddy was bad, then I probably couldn't explain why Mr. Vuoso was good.

All the way home, I thought about having sex with Thomas. I disagreed with Denise. I didn't think he was using me. I thought he was making a fair trade. Plus, I missed him. I wanted to be his girlfriend again.

After getting off the bus, I went to Melina's house. “Can I read my book for a while?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

I followed her inside, noticing how skinny she always looked from behind. It was nice because for a couple of seconds, I could pretend she wasn't pregnant.

In the living room, Melina sat down on the couch beside a ball of yellow yarn and a tiny sweater, stuck on knitting needles. “That looks like doll clothes,” I said.

“Yup,” she said.

“Maybe when your baby gets older, you could give her those clothes for her dolls.”

Melina shrugged. “If she plays with them.”

My book was on the coffee table, where I'd left it last time. I wondered if Melina and Gil ever had company over, and if they ever wondered what it was doing there. “Shouldn't you keep this someplace else?” I asked, reaching for it.

Melina looked up from her knitting. “Why?”

“I don't know.”

“There's nothing wrong with that book,” she said. “I'm happy for anyone who comes into my house to see it.”

She went back to her knitting and I looked around for a place to sit. There was a chair, but I decided to take the floor. I wanted to be far enough away from Melina that she couldn't see what I was reading. Plus, I liked being lower than her. It made me feel young.

The book said that if I decided to have sex, I could get a lot of diseases, and that I needed to use a condom. It said that the part of me where the orgasms came from would feel a vibration when Thomas's penis was inside me. There was a section, too, where it said that virginity was seen as something that made a girl pure, but that really, a girl could do whatever she wanted and that she wasn't anyone's property. In a way I liked that, but in a way I thought it seemed very sad. Most of the time, I really wanted to belong to somebody.

“Jasira,” Melina said.

I looked up. “Yes?”

“I have something for you.”

“What?”

“Hold on a sec.” She set her knitting down on the couch and went into the kitchen. When she came back, she handed me a key. “Here.”

“What's it for?” I asked.

“My house. This way, if you ever needed to come over here, at any time, for any reason, you can just let yourself in.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes. And you don't even have to tell me why. You can just come over, watch TV, read your book—whatever.”

“What if you're not home and it's just Gil?” I asked.

“It doesn't matter,” she said. “He knows I'm giving you a key and that you might use it.”

I thought about walking into Melina's house with only Gil there and how I wouldn't know what to say. It would be embarrassing. “Well,” I said, “thank you.”

“You're welcome,” she said, sitting back down on the couch.

“I probably won't need it,” I said.

She picked up her knitting. “You never know.”

I tried to start reading again, but I couldn't pay attention. I kept thinking about coming into Melina's house and never leaving.

That night before bed, I told Daddy I was taking a shower, but really I shaved my pubic hair. I used one of the razors Thomas had given me, and I did it just like he liked, with the thin strip down the middle. When I was finished, I collected all the black hairs from the drain, wrapped them in a piece of toilet paper, and threw them away.

In the morning when I woke up, I dressed in my nicest bra and underwear. For the first time, I noticed that they didn't match. The bra was one of the gray ones Daddy had bought me, and the underwear was white cotton. I put my jeans and sweater on, then took my backpack in the bathroom and slipped Mr. Vuoso's condom in the small zip pocket.

When I got to school, Denise was waiting for me at my locker. “You're not going to do it, are you?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

“But why?”

“Virginity doesn't make me pure,” I said.

“What?”

“I'm not anyone's property.”

“I never said you were,” she said. “I just don't think it's fair for Thomas to make you trade your virginity for his forgiveness.”

“It's not like that,” I said.

“Then what's it like?”

“I already told you,” I said. “I want to have sex with Thomas. If it also helps him to forgive me, then that's good, not bad.”

“This is stupid,” Denise said. “I hate that I know anything about this.” She walked away, and I watched the back of her hair bounce from how heavy she was stepping.

At lunch, Thomas wanted to know if I had remembered the condom, and I said I had. “Just one?” he asked, and I nodded.

After school, I walked past my bus and met Thomas in front of his. We got on together and took a seat toward the back. He held my hand all the way, like he used to in the halls at school. Every once in a while he would lean over and whisper in my ear, “I'm going to have sex with you.” I wasn't sure what to say back to him, so I just nodded.

When we got to Thomas's house, he reached inside his shirt for a key he wore on a chain around his neck. He didn't take the chain off, just lowered his neck to the level of the doorknob and leaned forward a little until the key reached the lock.

The first thing I noticed when we got inside was how much bigger the living room looked without the Christmas tree. There was still a pine smell in the air, though. Thomas set the mail he'd collected from outside on a table beside the door. “Do you want something to eat first?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. I was a little nervous.