Maidenhead (19 page)

Elijah was naked. His cock was straight up. He was holding it at the bottom with two hands, like a shovel. It was pointing at me. I was breathing hard.

‘Don’t leave us anymore, Myra. You understand?’

It felt good to hear her say my name. I was buzzing from my feet to my hair. I felt like Gayl was going to be my friend. She supported my union with Elijah, not Lee.

GAYL: See? You see how I got her converted?

LEE: Your tactics are suspect. I don’t like that at all.

GAYL:
She’s
the wormy little suspect, your friend. I’ll give her back when I’m finished. Natch.

LEE: Bitch.

GAYL: You like it like that.

§

My dad was taking Jeff to his overnight hockey tournament. I was making dinner for Elijah. I had an old recipe book of my mom’s, a yellow binder with quick leek quiche and spaghetti and meatballs, all these family standards. My mother’s writing marked up the margins:
Neil likes onions. Jeff finds carrots too hard. Jody and Myra eat broccoli in this.

I decided to make the whole dinner the day before: unpacking the meat, frying garlic, two onions, boiling in a couple of cans of skinned-out tomatoes, a cinnamon stick, bay leaf, five peppercorns.
Add one cup of wine. Less, if the kids.
When I measured the spaghetti for boiling I cooked enough for five – our old number around the table. But my mom and Jody had fled the coop. Dad and Jeff would be gone for the night. I was a lone Hegelian, with a horny pig’s tail, a self-conscious slave. I drank our last bottle of burgundy, masturbating, coming ten times in a row.

§

Aaron was drunk, he told me on the phone to warn me. I did not want to see him just because we’d fucked but he basically forced me to see him because he said it wasn’t fair that I wouldn’t see him, like I’d just
been
with him and how could I not see him after what we did together?

When I got to his room on the third floor, Aaron’s eyes were dim grey, like the light had blown out in a bulb. He was laughing at his book,
Gravity and Grace
.

‘“Base feelings, envy, resentment are degraded energy,”’ Aaron read out loud. ‘Come over here, baby. Does anyone call you
baby
?’

He stunk extremely of smoke and beer. Aaron looked up at me so needy that it made me really squirm. He was holding a pipe. He was going to light it.

‘I don’t think you need that,’ I said.

‘I’m insatiable, don’t you know that?’

I felt sorry for him. Aaron lit the pipe. His cheeks got hollow sucking in. I sat down beside him. He was insatiable for drugs. He wasn’t insatiable like I was insatiable. The thing was, he would’ve been so easily satisfied. I knew I could’ve done it too, just by kissing him or something. He would’ve been so happy.

‘Why didn’t tell me you were with someone else?’

‘What do you mean?’ It was my first instinct to lie.

‘Lee told me.’

Aaron read my silence. He sucked in some more. Fuck. Lee was like Jen and Charlene? Aaron had three paperbacks on the crate beside his mattress. One was called
The Violent Bear it Away
. Flannery O’Connor. Those three books were for me.

‘Myra, don’t you have anything to say?’

‘The violent bear it away.’

Aaron cursed on an exhale. Then he started to whine. ‘First, Wils, like, told me about Chris calling you titillating, all right? Next Lee tells me about you and this American dude. Some fucking Rasta? That’s just fucked up. It’s baffling. I mean, I was the first one to find you.’

‘Find me?’

‘Yeah. It’s a fucking
travesty
.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Aaron opened a can of beer. He pointed to the one beside it for me. I didn’t want it.

‘Look. I know you think about fucking all the time.’

He seemed so hurt. I could not speak. It’s true that that was what I was thinking about. My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn’t care. I’d pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I’d read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum.

Aaron lay on his back on a lumpy stained pillow, holding his beer. ‘I’m smarter than you think, Myra. I know you don’t wanna sleep with just me. I bet you probably want to sleep with Wils too. It’s okay, you’re young. I know ... ’

His eyes couldn’t stop closing. I felt sorry for him. I took the can of beer from his hand.

‘You’re beautiful, Myra. Not titill ... titillit ... titillating ... ’

Aaron unzipped his jeans. It took him three tries. His cock moved around inside his shorts. He held it still and closed his eyes. I thought of Elijah on his bed, cock hard and ready, and Gayl leading me away to the bathroom to prepare me. She’d told me that Elijah wasn’t ready to fuck me yet but that I should be patient. When it’s time, she’d said, it would blow my fucking mind. I moved Aaron’s hand. I took his penis out of his shorts and put it in my mouth. I didn’t want to but I did.

Aaron was instantly happy, moaning, ‘I just want to be your boyfriend, Myra. Myra, let me be your boyfriend.’

I was sucking him but pushing him out. Why wasn’t Elijah ready to fuck me? I was prepared! I didn’t want a boyfriend. Aaron was inside my mouth and pushing off the mattress and my head now felt like a light bulb too. I was just about to stop when everything inside of him filled up my mouth – everything sour and alive that hated me.

‘Sorry, man, sorry, Myra, god.’

It was like he hadn’t just come. I wiped my mouth. Aaron helped me do it with the sheet.

‘I’m sorry, you didn’t know, I’m really sorry, fuck, Myra, you didn’t know.’

I didn’t want his help with my face. ‘I
do
know about that,’ I said. Aaron wanted me to be his girlfriend, all romantic and drippy.

‘What the fuck?’ Aaron’s voice went up high.

‘Yeah, I’m with someone else,’ I said, confirming Lee.

Aaron looked around for the pipe in his sheets. ‘So this American Rasta has got a big dick? He shoves it down your throat? You let him cum all over your face? Go on. Tell me all the gory details.’

‘Fuck off!’ I yelled. ‘Why should I tell you about that?’

Aaron was going to cry. ‘Lee is a way better girlfriend than you.’

I stood up to leave. Being a girlfriend is a
travesty
.

LEE: Some guys are not in the space to ever know that a girl they are with has sex without their permission. Guys don’t know how to deal with the fact that a girl is free, that she has an autonomous life and an autonomous past and also that the problems in her life aren’t meant to be solved. Guys are problem-solvers and girls’ problems aren’t solvable. Girls’ problems are their life.

GAYL: Yeah, true, man, I think you’re right about that. Myra doesn’t even know the meaning of travesty.

§

When Elijah came into my bedroom he didn’t laugh at all. He picked things up and looked at them closely, like my pillow with the purple silk ruffle and the books I read when I was a kid. Elijah flipped through a folk-tale picture book with stories from around the world. In his scuffed white angel-armed robe he looked like the grand teller of all tales.

‘Why’s there no Africans in here? We got fairy tales too.’

Elijah stopped at Little Red Riding Hood from France. I remembered that story really well, my mother read it to me every night for a while when I was seven. In that French version, the wolf kills the grandmother and he makes Little Red Riding Hood drink her grandmother’s blood from a bottle. The wolf gets so close then to getting Little Red Riding Hood in the bed but she escapes, I remembered, by saying she had to pee. The wolf was suspicious so he tied Little Red Riding Hood’s ankle with a rope so that she could pee outside and he didn’t have to get out of bed but he knew that he still had her. Me and my mother liked that part. We called the wolf ‘jailer lazy.’ So of course Little Red Riding Hood tricks the wolf – she takes the rope off her ankle and ties it to a tree so that the wolf just thinks she’s peeing for a really long time. But when he pulls the rope, he can’t get her back. Little Red Riding Hood escapes home to her mom.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. My father and Jeff were supposed to come home late at night. There was time for a few things to happen.

I felt brave when Elijah was in my room. ‘I only know a little bit about you,’ I said, happy that I had him here, that Gayl was out of the equation. ‘I want to know more about you, I mean.’

Elijah sat down on my single mattress still looking at Little Red Riding Hood. He seemed oversize in here. He wanted to talk, not kiss. And not fuck fuck fuck.

‘We were working on the way up north,’ he said. ‘Tobacco farm, other stuff, the dregs. It’s why we took so long to get to you.’

‘A tobacco farm? Why?’

Elijah showed me his hands. There were four oval calluses along the top line of his palms. Faith, who used to clean our house, I remembered that she had calluses there too.

‘We hear there’s more work up in Brantford, near here.’

‘You’re going to leave?’

‘We’re on a path of work,’ Elijah said. ‘And Brantford is only an hour from here.’

‘Oh.’

Elijah put down my book of fairy tales. ‘What’s wrong, Angel?’

‘I mean ... who’s Gayl, then? I mean, really, to you?’

‘You’re trying to figure her out now? You’re smart, aren’t you?’

I didn’t know what to say. I’m not smart when it comes to you, I wanted to say. I would be smart if you fucked me! Please fuck me and I’ll know everything I need to.

But Elijah got up from my bed and walked out of my bedroom where I thought we would’ve done something. I followed him through my own house. He looked at Jody’s old room first, reached under her pillow and opened her closet. All she had in there were stacks of old shoes, boots and clothes. Then Elijah skipped across the hall into my parents’ room, straight into their walk-in closet. He noticed that the side where my mom’s clothes were supposed to be was empty. There was just one thing hanging, a white off-the-shoulder dress, something she hadn’t worn in years. Elijah didn’t poke much around in Jeff’s baby-blue room with all the posters of anime. He walked back down the hallway, then down the stairs. In the kitchen he looked in our fridge full of takeout containers. My pan of pre-stirred, pre-made spaghetti bolognese had thick yellow spots congealed on the top. Elijah grabbed a couple of old purple grapes that were rolling around on the bottom of the fruit drawer. He didn’t wash them before he popped them in his mouth.

‘These are anti-estrogen,’ Elijah said. ‘Not like that flesh.’

I felt too embarrassed to say something. It didn’t even occur to me that Elijah was a vegetarian but now the robes he wore made a bit more sense. Rastafarians are vegetarians, I was sure Jody knew that.

‘Animal is bad for you,’ Elijah said, as he flicked my boob through my shirt.

Even that crappy flick made my nipples hard.

I followed Elijah down to the basement, my father’s lair. I hadn’t been down there since my mother left. My dad had strung makeshift curtains around a mattress on the floor. Inside the hut was his computer too, on a cheap brown desk.

‘I like this,’ Elijah said. ‘Privacy. Men need that.’

Elijah turned on my father’s computer from a switch at the back. It smelled like my dad inside these curtains, but sharper, like the inside of a boot. I had no idea why he’d walled himself off in a fort but it felt kind of creepy being inside it. Elijah didn’t look at me as he waited for the computer. He sat down on my dad’s swirly brown chair and spun around in it a bunch of times. It was really weird now to have him here. I didn’t feel brave at all anymore. Elijah hadn’t wanted to stay in my bedroom. He wanted to be in my father’s chair.