Slow Hand (26 page)

Pick up the sticky remains of your nighttime treat and walk toward the kitchen.

The hall is dark, and this makes you nervous, even though you are not alone in the house. It is midnight, the witching hour, and what good is your father or brother in the face of the evil that may be out there, that
must
be out there; otherwise why would you feel so unsafe? But it is a feeling you have gotten used to. Insecurity is the norm, and turning on a light would expose you. There is power in the dark and the quiet, as much as there is fear. You see others, but they do not see you.

It frees you to listen there by the door as your father and his wife stifle their moans. You stand on the balls of your feet, poised to dart into the kitchen if anyone should come out. You check for a light under the door of your brother’s bedroom. Nothing. You turn back to the clandestine activity behind your parents’ door, straining desperately for more sound, more stimulation. But usually the rustles and squeaks and murmurs are all you can grasp. Usually, they are enough. You feel the involuntary twitch between your legs, and the dull, low ache that begins in your crotch and twists a path into your gut.

Rush into the kitchen to hide the evidence of your binge. Quickly, so that you can get back to the cavern of your sheets and the treat waiting for you there. Once in bed, reach under the pillow and pull out the bottle of baby lotion. It is your teddy bear.

The lotion is cool as it touches your fingers, and you pause for a moment, anticipating the sensation when you reach between your legs. It is even colder there. It is wonderful. You spread it around eagerly between the folds of skin and over that one most sensitive spot. The clit, but you don’t like calling it that. No, don’t think. Right now, at long last, you don’t have to think. Just let go, just imagine—
him.
Tall and athletic and a little dirty, always spitting tobacco juice by the side of the road at the bus stop. A hick, but they’re all like that around here. What matters is that he pays attention to you. It makes going to school in this chicken farm, chicken shit county almost bearable.
Just to greet him in the morning, perhaps bring him some cookies, have him sit with you at the back of the bus and reach up your skirt, between your knees.

Close your eyes and imagine him now, being with him in a way you have never been. Think what it would be like if he were swirling his tongue where his hand has been, and you clutching the sides of his head with your thighs, his shaggy brown hair wet against your skin. He is licking slowly from bottom to top, in long ice cream cone swipes. Your own tongue goes out to lick the air as you envision his, searching through every crevice. Your hand is his mouth, and then his lips, sucking around that unnamed spot, nibbling, seeking, devouring, around and around so warm and wet until you burst and writhe and whisper, almost too loud, “Fuck me! Yes, fuck me now!

The distance from pleasure to pain is too short. First, the fear: that someone has heard your little outburst. Perhaps Lois, the stepmonster so adept at eavesdropping. Or worse, your father.

Then, the guilt. At having fantasized so recklessly. At not being normal. At not fitting in with anyone in this town. Your “new home,” so they say, but really just another stop in a string of wanderings, of Dear-Old-Dad-Trying-to-Find-Himself-Wanderings. You don’t know anyone, except your back of the bus buddy, and no one, especially not your parents, knows you. Knows what you do. The lotion and the food every night.

When did you learn to do this? A year ago? Two years? About when you learned to throw up. About when you learned to hate them.

It is a thrill to hide these treats. There they sit, in the very next room, as you sneak food from the kitchen to the bathroom, gorge on giant-sized Kit Kat bars or whatever it is, lean over the toilet, and then throw it all up. You know just when to flush so that it drowns out the sound as you gag on your own finger. Eating your cake but not having it.

You never know when you will get caught. When your father, grown sullen at the dinner table after too much to drink,
will say, “Come sit on my lap” in his all too friendly dirty old man pathetic son of a bitch kind of way. And you will sit, to avoid his anger. Then perhaps he will say, “I know what you’ve been up to with the lotion.” And he will look at you, rosy-eyed, rosy-cheeked, with that mocking smile of his: “You know, the Incas used to burn women at the stake who disgraced themselves that way.” Or some other similar nonsense. But part of you will believe it, or at least the implication that you are dirty and deserving of a terrible death.

But you cannot give them up, your treats. They are the only pleasure you know. They get you through these dinners, for one thing, when you are forced to be with your father and Lois. They get you through the exhaustion of pretending.

Sit up straight and wait for your father to take his first bite before you begin. Then smell it and say, as genuinely as you can, “Mmmmm.”

Take a mouthful, and then another, as if you can’t get enough, and then: “Lois, this is really delicious.”

“Well thanks. It’s cassoulet, the national dish of France.”

Your brother plays the game too: “What’s this meat in here? It’s really good.”

“That’s goose.”

“Mostly the gizzards,” your father amends. He has decided to take this opportunity to further your education. “This dish originated with the French peasants. They couldn’t afford to waste, like some of us can” (a deliberate look to both kids), “so they used every part of the bird. They ate the meat off, then cooked the bones and the insides.”

He takes another bite with hands made shaky from drink. He is very self-conscious about it so you try not to stare. But it is a natural attention grabber, the way he scoops up the beans in the spoon and carries them painstakingly toward his mouth, and all the while they are spilling back into the plate, so at the end he must lurch forward to grasp the last few before they too fall away.

He looks up, suddenly, as if he has caught everyone staring at him. You purse your lips in expectation of his wrath. But he
says instead, “Lois and I have to go on a trip this weekend. Her father isn’t feeling well, and we thought it best to look in on him. We figured it would be a drag” (he is always trying to use a “hip” expression for your benefit) “for you two, so if you promise to be good” (and here he looks at you and your brother both, one at a time, with a long meaningful glare) “then we’ll let you take care of yourselves overnight.”

Stay calm. Take care not to reveal your delight.

Smile and say okay, well be fine, I’m sorry for your father, Lois. Shall I clear the table now? Thanks again for dinner.

Go into the bathroom and vomit. It soothes your nerves, your excitement.

This is better than you ever hoped.

Finally!
you think, as you flush the majestic national dish down the toilet.

You’ve got it all arranged. You will meet him at the end of the driveway the night your parents are gone. You will keep the porch light off so the neighbors don’t see him and report back to your father. He may have asked them to spy. Your brother is going out at eight o’clock. He is planning to spend his night of freedom drinking Beam with his friends outside the Tastee Freeze. He is not so innocent either. You have agreed to stay home and cover the phone, among other things.

When you go to meet
him,
you are wearing your shortest dress, pantyhose, and heels. He knows what he is here for. Though you have not had the opportunity to take things further than the back of the bus, he has hinted from the beginning about his intentions. From the time when you first let him kiss you outside the rear exit door of the school. He had taken your breasts in his hands, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if they belonged to him. At first, you thought maybe you should object, but you didn’t. You let him. You even let him reach down the front of your jeans as far as he could squeeze his fingers, where he took one slow circle with his hand and came up with a finger covered with wetness. You watched as he brought his hand up to his nostrils and breathed in, sniffing deeply and with relish.

He is older.

Now, as you approach him, walking carefully over the gravel, you hardly have time to make out his face in the dark before you feel his breath on your forehead, his hands clutching your buttocks, his penis thrusting out through the thin fabric of his shorts.

Make him wait. This is your night, your territory. You are not a woman, but for now you can pretend.

Take him by the zipper and lead him silently back into your bedroom. Make him stand apart from you, watching but not touching as you undress, staring him down with the bravado of a whore.

Make him get down on his knees and engulf your sex with his mouth.

Make him work hard, harder, not coming up for air. Keeping his head in place, forcing it to stay, both of you needing air, but holding on for more. This is so much more than you had imagined and almost too much all at once, so you push him away. He too seems a little off-balance. You stare at him shamelessly, there down between your legs, and you realize that maybe he hadn’t done that before. That his finger smelling had been a bit of machismo which he wasn’t planning to follow up on.

You have shaken him up.

You are the stronger one here.

Take his clothes off, slowly, so slowly, making him wait as you lightly brush each patch of skin with your lips. Stay a long time around his stomach, knowing he aches for you to go lower. You blow lightly on his penis, seeing it twitch uncontrollably in response.

The power.

Kneeling before him, you take him by the hips and spin him around, forcing him to his hands and knees. Before he can protest, you shove your tongue between his buttocks, all the way up, reaching for that bit of flesh behind the two sacs lying so helplessly there. That obscure, out of the way area you have seen in the pictures and have always been curious about.

Is he saying something now? It doesn’t matter. Push him
down onto the bed and order him to wait there, on his back, as you walk slowly to the kitchen to retrieve the bottle of honey. There is something else you’ve always been curious about.

“What’re you up to?” he asks, looking both a little afraid and a little thrilled.

You flip open the cap of the honey. It is a silly little plastic bottle shaped like a bear. You squeeze it hard, so the honey gushes out over his penis, onto his thighs, shining thick, in the patches of hair. He has stopped questioning.

Keep his eyes locked to yours as you go down slowly, purposefully, and he groans in anticipation, much like the groans you have heard from that other room on so many nights.

You taste the slimy sweetness of the honey, and the salty flesh beneath. You grope messily around with your tongue, licking it all up. And suddenly you taste the rush of fluid escaping from him, along with his gasps. It comes half on your tongue and half on his stomach, swirling with the honey like saltwater taffy. You lick it up, all of it, with the ache between your legs growing more intense.

This you won’t throw up. This is a treat all your own.

As you slurp the last of the liquid from his belly button, you reach behind and slap him hard, too hard, on the ass.

“Now, “you say, “fuck me.”

AU
THOR’S NO
TE

“Too Tall for Grace” was the first story I accepted for Slow Hand, and, after you read it, it should be easy to understand why it gave me an extra measure of confidence. Radiating strength and careful originality, it is set in a community of women whose everyday lives are spent in the sort of examination most of us prefer to avoid. The questions Susan Leonardi raises are about love, about sexual desire, about body and spirit, and she recognizes that in any human being conflict is both natural and inevitable. Observing the serenity and the pain inherent in difficult choices, Leonardi passes no judgment, only showing us how lovers with different needs adjust to one another, striving always to fine-tune their responses and express their devotion.

K
aren had started to run on the day after the end of the world. She ran even though only recently she had been very ill, with a mysterious liver ailment, and almost died. She ran even though she hadn’t run since her last high school track meet ten years before. She ran even though the mountain roads
knocked the breath out of her before she had gone a quarter of a mile. And she kept on running for five years, though not with the determination or desperation of the first day, the first week, the first month. She ran in the early seventies, before runners became (even in the mountains where you’d think just living would be exercise enough) familiar figures and before the books appeared telling you how to maximize your endorphin high and minimize the damage to your limbs. She ran until her right knee gave out, whether from the running itself or from what she heard as she ran by Lisa’s open window, she didn’t know.

What she did know was that half a mile into her run that day, her knee buckled and she fell. She limped home, cried—whether from the pain in her knee or from the pain of hearing what she heard as she ran by Lisa’s open window, she wasn’t sure, though she had a pretty good idea and she didn’t like it—until her eyes were swollen shut. She was afraid to cry anymore, so she lay on her bed and willed away the pain so successfully that by morning she could walk without limping. The areas around the knee and around the heart, however, felt tenuous and sore, and her eyes were still swollen. The swelling was ugly and uncomfortable but hid the angry, disgusted, pleading looks she directed, against her will and better judgment, at Anne all through matins and lauds. She spent the afternoon alone, tending the flowers in the greenhouse, taking special care of the lavender roses, whose skins she touched, whose outer petals she blew gently, whose inner petals, though she could not see them, she sang to in a low quiet voice. Eventually she sang their favorites, “Lavender’s Blue, Dilly, Dilly” and then “Purple People Eater” in reparation for the folksy laments she started with. They suited her mood but might, she feared, make the roses droop.