Maidenhead (2 page)

‘Be back for dinneroo,’ my dad said, his eyebrows going up and down.

I didn’t want to pass by my mother on her lounge chair after making such a no-drama escape. I knew she loathed my dad’s baby talk.

At the beach, college girls lay in groups on the sand around buckets of drinks, their bums curved up like fruits. Mine didn’t do that. I had to pee. Guys whipped Frisbees over volleyball nets, noses as red as my dad’s. I couldn’t look at their bodies, jumping like dogs. My towel was a cape. I heard them laughing when I passed. There was this one guy near a pool-hiding hedge watching the game, with a walking stick. He had muscular legs, bare feet and a stomach that I could see the sweat on. The guy stopped watching the game with the college boys when I passed. I thought he was maybe selling something even though he had nothing but that stick. This guy had short thick dreadlocks with beads on the bottom. He was black, flawless, shining. I walked for another few minutes on the beach until no one was around. I left my towel and book in a heap on the sand.

The sea was lukewarm; it didn’t seem clean. I crouched down low in the water so my whole bathing suit was covered but I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t pee.

When I lay down on my towel I went on my stomach like the college girls. My bum was a grape. I was going to buy motorcycle sunglasses like theirs.

‘Enjoying the sun?’

That black guy with the stick was suddenly beside me. He had on a rust-coloured bathing suit, two front strings hanging down untied. The walking stick was burnt and etched with triangle designs.

‘What’s your name?’ the guy asked. He had some kind of accent. Jamaican, I thought, because of the dreadlocks. But it wasn’t Jamaican, I knew that much too.

I thought that he was maybe going to ask me for money. I didn’t have any money with me. I was hoping he wasn’t going to ask me that.

‘What’s your name?’ the guy asked again. He crouched down at the level of my face. His bathing suit had been wet. It was rumpled and sort of bulged in the middle.

I didn’t feel the sun anymore. The hairs on his legs were little C’s and S’s. He smelled like toast right before it gets burnt. The hand on his thigh was bigger than my book.

‘It’s okay, girl. I am just asking your name.’

‘Myra,’ I said quickly.

This guy had a high, square forehead and a very big mouth. His eyes were moving, soft, the lids were kind of purple. He ran his huge hand through his dreadlocks, then over his mouth. I felt so tired. A man had never been this close to me.

‘Can I sit with you? That okay? If you let me, okay?’

I nodded yes. I really had to pee.

The guy laid his walking stick down right in between us. Then he took something out of a pocket in the back of his bathing suit. It was a little clay animal, a turtle, palm-sized, with a graph carved into its shell. The guy looked at me and put it up to his mouth. I crossed my ankles and uncrossed them. Then, with two fingers the guy covered the holes on top of the turtle’s shell and started playing. He made one high note for a really long time. I rolled over onto my back. The guy began to play faster in time with his rapid breathing. His stomach started jiggling, his fingers were moving up and down like a tarantula. I turned my head to the side. I could see the guy’s face from underneath. Then the song ended with one long note as if the turtle in his mouth was moaning:
Here. Here. Heeeeeeear
.

The guy looked down at me. He squeezed the turtle in his fist.

‘That was cool,’ I said quickly. ‘That thing is really, really cool.’

For some reason, I couldn’t sit back up or roll over. The guy was sweating even more. He reached for his walking stick and I thought he was going to leave. I really wanted to sit up but I couldn’t. I felt the curve of my back in the sand. I crossed my hands over my chest. I thought my bum might actually be like those college girls’, the way I felt it right now underneath me. It was stupid what I’d said, so stupid that I’d said his playing was cool. I wanted to just get up and go back to our motel but I had to pee so badly that I probably would’ve started to run and I didn’t want to run away from this guy. I didn’t want him to think I was scared.

I stared at the guy’s feet where some sand bugs were crawling. He looked like he had an extra knuckle in each toe – the big toe was the worst, cracked in the pattern of a star. I was feeling too hot, too stiff, getting burnt at my knees. The guy was staring at my lying-down body. He had his hand over his eyes to see me better.

‘Would you like to try this? Yeah?’

The guy laid the little clay animal on the crease between my thighs, right at the top. My ankles twisted around each other. I didn’t want the turtle to drop on the sand.

‘Come, come on. Try.’

The guy’s lips broke for his teeth, which were white on top, kind of yellow on the bottom. I finally sat up. The head of the turtle was dark, a little wet.

‘Put it at your mouth.’

I felt dizzy from lying down, from the sun. ‘If I blow on that thing, nothing’s going to come out.’ I laughed then and said sorry, even though I didn’t mean to. I was just hot. The sun was too hot.

‘It’s called an ocarina, okay. It’s got sacred sound. You put it at your mouth and blow.’

‘Okay ... ’

‘Try it.’

‘No, it’s okay ... ’

The ocarina was warm. I tried to give it back. But the guy put his hand on my hand, led it to my mouth. ‘Everyone can play music,’ he said.

Then he sat there watching me decide if I was going to blow. I felt my scalp sweat. I wished he hadn’t moved his hands from my hands.

‘Go ahead, go.’ The guy was stroking the sand with his fingers, raking it, making it deeper and dark.

My lower jaw moved around a little. I let my lips part and my tongue touched my teeth. The mouthpiece smelled like caramel. I finally put it in and tried to blow a bit. My first sound was like a twig being snapped. I tried to blow differently, harder, but it was nothing like when the guy had played it. I couldn’t make my sounds sound right. There was a sudden cramp in my gut and I stopped.

‘I told you I wouldn’t be able to play anything,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

‘You weren’t bad at all. You have to give a first try, right?’

The guy winked at me. His eyes were glassy and big.

When I handed the ocarina back, my fingers touched his again. The guy held me there for a second. His tongue licked his lips. I looked down. I felt a smile in the middle of my throat. Is this how you really meet a guy?

Then, I think because I had to go to the bathroom so badly, I flopped back down on the sand on my back, pretending that I was getting some sun. I knew he was watching me, waiting for something. I put my arm over my eyes. I felt him stare in my bathing-suit holes. My armpit was a little nude crease that was opening.

‘The sounds you made were sweet,’ the guy said. ‘You’re just a little bit shy. You’re a shy girl, it’s okay.’

The sounds I made were not sweet, I knew that.

‘Come now for a walk,’ the guy said.

This guy maybe thought that I wasn’t with my family on a family vacation. Maybe he thought that I was a college kid, that I was more than sixteen. I never thought I was shy, a shy girl. It was like he was waiting for me to say yes. To say yes as if I knew what I wanted.

‘I understand. It’s okay,’ the guy said. ‘I should leave you be.’

But he still didn’t get up, even after he said that. He started pushing his finger towards me through the sand. I felt like I wanted to laugh. But I was squinting and licking my lips continually.

‘Come? Yes?’

I was thinking: Girls get scared way too often. Girls get stupidly scared. I was not scared.

Telling myself not to be scared kind of worked.

I stood up at the same time as the guy. My stomach was bloated. I was holding it in. The guy had his walking stick in one hand and he covered his bathing-suit strings with the other. The turtle bulged in his back bathing-suit pocket. I held tightly on to my book.

This man likes me, and my family knows nothing about it.

LEE: You have to let people be witnesses. It’s the most human thing, to tell people what happened to you.

GAYL: Nah, a story is visual only. Words are meant to be spit out and forgotten.

LEE: Trauma gets lodged in our bodies. We can’t just spit it out.

GAYL: Trauma’s not a story.

LEE: Trauma is a story.

GAYL: Trauma’s comedy. Trauma’s got the power of unseen forces. At least then, with your body, you can metamorphose it.

§

I felt like I was old enough. If I’d had my own motel room I would’ve just taken the guy back to it, not to do anything, not to pull back the covers, not to scratch, not to strip, just to not be in public with this guy.

I wanted to see myself while it was all happening. I wanted to know how different I’d look when I was eighteen. All the girls and guys in Key West who were just two, maybe three, years older than me. They all had their own motel rooms. They had balconies looking out onto the pool. I saw guys and girls dancing out there and drinking beers when it was two in the afternoon. I knew guys and girls slept together in the same kind of bed that I was sleeping in with my sister. I hated how the sheets were tucked in so tight after the cleaning ladies came every day. I felt sorry for the women who worked at this place because I bet those college kids made a mess of their rooms. We’d had this cleaning lady at home when I was twelve who came to our house once a week. Her name was Faith and she was from Jamaica. Once, when I put my lunch dishes in the sink while she was standing there washing with rubber gloves, she told me that I was a spoiled little brat. I didn’t understand at first why she said that, or why she spoke so harshly to me. ‘You think I’m going to clean up after you?’ she said. ‘Or your mother? You want your mummy to clean up your mess?’ I took my dishes quietly out of the sink and loaded them into the dishwasher. I hadn’t ever been talked to like that. I was trying to think about exactly what I’d done wrong. I remember I went upstairs and called Jen. ‘Guess what Faith just called me?’ I said. Jen cracked up when I told her the whole thing.

‘She’s fucked up and bitter and taking it out on you,’ Jen said. ‘You should tell your mom.’

But Faith wasn’t around much longer after she called me a spoiled little brat. My mother said she had to go back to Jamaica even though her husband there had abused her. I didn’t understand why she had to leave and why she wasn’t ever coming back. When I was twelve I hadn’t even ever heard the word abused before. My mother didn’t explain that to me either, what that meant, a man abusing his wife. She just said that in Jamaica Faith had a lot of problems and it was a place that she didn’t want to be.

‘Canada.’ The guy kept repeating ‘Canada’ as we walked away from the sea. ‘Canada is a good country to be born in.’

I nodded my head. I couldn’t walk fast because my stomach was cramping.

‘I was born in Tanzania,’ he said.

I didn’t say: Tanzania is a good country to be born in.

On the main road of town we passed by a bar where kids were drinking tequilas and beer at an all-day happy hour. I had my towel wrapped tightly around me, my book under the towel. I had only about twenty more pages of
Cat’s Eye
, but I knew I’d lost my spot. I thought it was weird that the college kids weren’t looking at us, because it was obvious this guy with the dreadlocks was so much older than me. Coconuts lay on the sidewalk, some of them smashed. Maybe the kids didn’t think it was weird that we were together. The guy turned down an alleyway that opened between two white motels, holding out his hand to me. Bushes with spike-petalled pink blooms hung down to the ground. I took the guy’s hand quickly but I looked at the ground. Our hands sucked together. It felt amazing. It made me embarrassed.

‘Okay, you’re okay,’ the guy said, squeezing. ‘Shy is okay.’

There was a little store in the alley with a glass-beaded curtain in the doorway. A woman was sitting on a stool outside. She had long dyed-black hair that was frizzy on top, like she’d been rubbing it with a balloon. She winked as she saw us.

‘Hi, babes,’ she said as we passed, her smile dissolving.