Jubana! (28 page)

All I saw was “Kill.”

T
here's a Hemingway short story called “Soldier's Home,” in which Krebs, a young college man from Oklahoma, enlists in the Marines in 1917, goes off to fight in the war on the Rhine, and returns to his mother's house two years later. The story is about the absurdity Krebs feels now, after what he has seen overseas. He's probably suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, though nobody knew from PTSS in Hemingway's time. Krebs's mother serves him breakfast: two fried eggs, bacon, and pancakes. As she tries to talk to him about getting a job and his plans for the future, Hemingway writes, “Krebs felt embarrassed and resentful as always…[he] looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.”

That's how I felt in the weeks and months and years after The Prick, like a Hemingway character regarding the bacon. Which is why when Valerie, my beloved and beautiful WASP cousin, called up a few days after The Prick left for good and invited me to stay with her for a couple of weeks at the beginning of that summer, it was as if the clouds had parted and the sun came out.

Every morning Walter went off to work and Valerie made me what I considered the best breakfast in the world: hot chocolate, a bowl of chilled mandarin oranges, and a mini Sara Lee pecan coffee cake, heated just until the swirls of white icing softened. We'd spend the rest of the day at the Shoreham Hotel pool next door to Valerie's fabulous apartment, ordering lunch on Valerie's tab (which I doubt hotel owner and best friend Bernie Bralove ever made her pay), shopping at Lord & Taylor in Chevy Chase, and getting our nails done at their beauty salon. It was like being at some exclusive spa, the ideal therapy for a latter-day Jubana Krebs. If I just swam in my Valerie's Lord & Taylor boy-cut two-piece with black, white, violet, and aqua stripes; got sun; ate a club sandwich with my TaB poolside; had shiny coral-pink toenails; and didn't think about The Prick, I didn't get the queasy sensation. To me there was nothing worse. I could never understand bulimics. Anorexics, sure. But intentional vomiting? On your knees in front of the toilet with tears streaming down your cheeks? I knew a Sidwellemy who did that. It completely grossed me out.

The Braloves, Bernie and Alice, invited us to a dinner party at their house, the one Valerie had always told me was really nice. Valerie had bought me a new summer dress for the occasion, dark green with small white flowers, and new white leather T-strap Bernardo flats just like Valerie's sandals. Valerie wasn't kidding about the Braloves'
casa—
it was huge and gorgeous, with forest-green wrought-iron furniture in the beautifully landscaped large backyard, which was where we would be eating dinner. The family had two big, friendly, well-groomed dogs, golden retrievers, I think, that ran around with their big pink panting tongues and wagging tails. White-gloved waiters served cocktails (Shirley Temples for the kids) and lots of little tiny finger foods I could not identify on silver trays, and candles flickered and tiny electric
white lights shimmered everywhere. It was like being a guest at Gatsby's, I imagined.

There were two long tables set up for dinner, one for the adults and another for the kids. If this were a typical Cuban party at the 'rents, I'd be seated with the adults, as I have always been. But here, I was seated with the kids, all of whom were preteen. The down cushion on my chair softly depressed under me. How magical. I'd never sat on down before. As waiters cleared the salad plates, I sipped my Shirley Temple and patted the dogs. The sun was setting, turning the already lovely garden into
A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I tore off pieces of dinner rolls and fed the dogs. Valerie had said tomorrow it would rain, so instead of swimming we could go see
The Exorcist
or
The Way We Were.
I overheard her and the other adults discussing the televised Senate Watergate Committee hearings, which everybody was obsessed with that summer. I didn't pay much attention; I just felt bad for Peter Haldeman and wondered what dinner would be, and dessert.

Something felt wet. I looked up. No rain. The evening sky was dimming but clear. I shifted on my down cushion and it was wetter. I pushed my heavy chair back, scraping its shapely verdigris legs across the gray flagstone. I pulled back my dress. In the shadowy light, black ink ran down my legs. I wasn't expecting my period. Actually, I hadn't had one for…was it two months? Three? I looked around. No one was looking at me. I got up and slowly walked backward toward the house. I'd noticed a powder room earlier, just off the patio's sliding glass doors. One of the dogs began sniffing the gooey path I was leaving across the stone tile, the other one began licking my legs. I broke away and hurried inside. My sandals squished and I tripped on a fluffy white double-pelt sheepskin area rug. Wine-red blood with things in it was everywhere, on everything—the white rug, me, and out past the sliding doors. It looked like a crime scene.

I locked the bathroom door behind me. More blood, heavier, thicker, and coagulated, oozed out of me, spilling out of my panties onto the floor, staining the (of course) white carpet. I carefully peeled off the panties and turned on the water in the sink. I soaked one of three very nicely monogrammed white linen hand towels in the stream and tried to clean myself. The towel turned red. I grabbed another and pushed it up between my legs. It, too, turned red. I sat on the toilet, and more big, soft, wet pieces and things plopped out, making the water splash up. I used all the toilet paper and flushed, but the wads of tissue clogged the tank. I tore off my ruined dress, the beautiful summer dress Valerie had just bought me that morning, and used it as a makeshift stopper. It was a terrible thing to do and see, but the tiny hand towels were obviously useless.

Jesus Christ, what
was
this?

I returned to the sink. The medicine cabinet mirrored a frightened ingenue in a slasher movie. Blood was smeared across my face, my glasses, my neck, my bra, my hair—how was that? I removed my glasses and washed my face but the bleeding below wouldn't stop. There was a shower stall on the far side of the room. I pulled off my bra and got in.
Great
water pressure. Of course it was. The Braloves are rich, they would only have a shower like this. Oh my God, so much blood on the imported white tile floor! It was just like in
Psycho
except a lot fancier.

What the fuck
was
this?

Oh, I just wanted to dissolve in that shower with the water and the blood and the purple pieces and red blobs and swirl right down that affluent drain. It was mortifying. I could never leave this bathroom! Well, hopefully I would die and then I wouldn't have to worry about it. The embarrassment. The clean-up. Who was going to clean this up? Who would? And how could I ever face the Braloves? I'd just ruined their beautiful rich people's house
and my beautiful Bernardo Italian sandals. And, oh God, my beautiful Valerie. Oh God, Valerie. And Walter. Now the shower drain was clogged, too. Shit! This would be
bad.

There was a soft knock on the door. Oh no.

“Gigi?” Valerie asked. Her voice was typically low, sturdy, and reassuring. “Love? It's Valerie. Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I lied, feeling weak. I wanted to disappear.

“Will you open the door?”

“No,” I said, about to swoon. “It's not good in here.”

“Just a crack? I'm alone.”

“Really?” I could barely stand up.

“I'd never lie to you,” Valerie said. “Come on, darling. It's all right, whatever it is.”

“No,” I said. “It's not.” I may not have known what had happened to me, but the humiliation alone was enough to keep me in that bathroom forever.

“I'll help,” Valerie said. “Please unlock the door, love.”

I did. I saw the outer corner of Valerie's right eye. It was startlingly blue. I heard her gasp. I saw her blink.

“Hold on,” Valerie said. She was taking off her sandals.

I backed up and Valerie walked in, closing the door behind her. We were both up to our toenails in my blood. It sloshed.

“You're going to be fine,” Valerie said. “Just hang on while I—”

“I ruined my dress!” I cried. “And my sandals! My pedicure! I'm so sorry!”

“Fuck that,” Valerie said, hugging me and imparting the perfume of her Joy. “We'll get all new ones.”

I was wet from the shower and blood still flowed, though less, from the inside of my thighs. The embrace soiled Valerie's beautiful emerald green raw silk blouse, which she'd chicly tied in a knot at the waist. Though she'd rolled the bottoms of her white trousers, they too were red. Valerie reminded me of Jackie Ken
nedy in her bloodstained Chanel suit after poor dead JFK was killed.

“Hang on,” Valerie said, cupping my pallid cheek in her tawny hand. Her smile was like her voice: gentle, strong, heartening. It always made you feel better, always less ashamed.

When Valerie returned, she'd cleaned up and changed into a sleeveless black cotton piqué dress, though she was still barefoot. I knew our hostess, the former ballerina Alice Bralove, was standing outside the door because I'd heard her and Valerie murmuring. Valerie held a pile of fresh folded bath sheets that smelled good, as if they'd just come out of the dryer. She dried me off. The blood was subsiding. An elegant pair of arms, dancers' arms, took the towels and handed Valerie two Kotex pads and an elastic belt with two hooks. I put it on. The arms handed Valerie a clean cotton nightgown. Valerie slipped it over my head. The arms handed Valerie a heavy cotton patchwork quilt. Valerie swaddled me in it like a papoose. She picked me up, my face curled into her chest, and carried me out to the car, where Walter awaited us.

 

“Ana? Gigi's not feeling well,” Valerie said into the phone. I was sprawled on the Oguses' huge leather sofa, still wrapped in the quilt. Walter handed me my glasses—I'd forgotten all about them—and a cup of lemony sweet hot tea. “Oh no, she's going to be fine. Something didn't quite agree with her. You'd better come over. She'll be better off in her own bed tonight.”

I could barely keep my eyes open.

“Your folks are on their way,” Valerie said, taking the tea I was about to drop because I was so drowsy and drained. She lay down next to me and stroked short wispy tendrils off my forehead. I fell asleep to the comfort of Valerie's voice singing a familiar lullaby,
our first Beatles song: “Oh yeah I'll tell you something I think you'll understand, / When I'll say that something, I wanna hold your hand…”

 

“Jesus Christ in the Ozarks!” the fiancé said when I told him the story.

This was the man I was going to
marry.
He was my best friend, the one I told everything to, entrusted everything to. I wanted him to know me, accept me fully, and love me even though (or maybe because) something really awful had happened to me a long time ago. It was part of me.

We were on my pretty ivory sofa, Paul sitting up and me lying down with my legs stretched out across his lap. I loved stretching my legs across his lap. I used to do it under the dinner table all the time. It relaxed me. When we were first dating, Paul sent me an E-mail saying, “I don't do feet [massages].” Well, maybe not the ex-rated wife's or any of my immediate (Paul's postdivorce) predecessors, but let's face it, I do possess cutlets. It's rare. So the fiancé got over that one.

“YOU SHOULD HAVE GONE TO A HOSPITAL IMMEDIATELY,” Paul shouted. “PERIOD.”

Paul loved using the word
period
at the end of his sentences and using it as a single-word sentence. In this eat-what-you-kill world it was the syntactical equivalent of walking softly and carrying a big swagger stick. Period.

“It wasn't Valerie's place to take me to the ER,” I said, pushing my veal heel up against his Dino palm. “She would have never assumed that. Not her style to enlighten the 'rents or anybody else, for that matter. Women all around the world throughout history survive these things. Things are always coming out of us. The bleeding was stopping by the time we got back to her place.”

“Geeg, you had a MISCARRIAGE from that fucking child RAPIST. You and Valerie were stepping on the PLACENTA.”

I'd never said those words—
miscarriage, rapist, placenta
—to myself or to anyone else. At fifteen, I was still pretty immature and simply considered it a
really
freaky period. What wounded me more was having been fucked and forsaken. Sitting with Gramps fifteen years later, I talked about The Prick but I never mentioned the bloody aftermath because I still had a disconnect; I never associated having sex with what happened in the Braloves' bathroom. If I had, I wouldn't have consciously withheld it from Gramps, whom I trusted. But by the time Paul came along a decade later, something in me did make the connection, suddenly, on the sofa. Still, I was stunned when the “not observant at all” fiancé said those hard words out loud. I was already deeply in love with Paul. But this deepened my feelings and made me want to give him everything.

“Jesus Christ!” Paul continued. “You have to CONFRONT that sick twisted asshole pre-vert!”

“I never thought about it,” I said, pulling away my pounded veal cutlets and sitting up. “Where would I even start? And anyway, maybe it
was
just a really really really bizarre period. You don't know and I don't know if it was really a miscarriage. Right? Who's to say?”

“Anybody can be found,” Paul continued. He was on a roll. When he got like this I'd call it being on a Kaiser roll, which eventually got shortened to being on a Kaiser, which eventually got shortened to being on a Kais or just simply Kais-ing. “You have to do this. For YOURSELF. For your own CLOSURE.”

“I don't know,” I said, reaching for my trusty TaB and Parliaments. “It's not something you can ‘close.' It's…internal.”