Stranded (11 page)

“Pack the bowl,” he instructed, shaking his head.

A small blue bowl perched on his bedside table and I reached for it but found that it was already full of pennies, guitar picks, three or four bent paper clips, some cellophane packets of what looked like cold medicine, and a broken wristwatch. I had gotten high before, with Katy at a party when a joint was making the rounds. I had seen people smoke dope on television, but it seemed to involve a whole different set of paraphernalia than what Kenny was asking me to handle. When I realized I had made a mistake about what Kenny meant by
bowl
, I fidgeted with other things on the table.

“Who is this?” I lifted a picture of a woman wearing a tie-dye shirt over a bathing suit.

“Fuck.” Kenny ripped it from my hand.

How cute, I thought. The woman looked like him, minus the pasty skin. Nana claimed that men who were passionate about their mothers made the best Prince Charming material, and, no question, Kenny churned with emotion. He slammed the picture face-down on the table, breaking the glass. Instead of cleaning the mess, he dug a ceramic object out of his drawer and loaded pot into a depression in the front.
There was another excavation through his dirty clothes before he produced a lighter. Getting high with Kenny at least helped me escape everything weighing on me—my cousin, Nana and her clean surfaces, Mom and Harvey.

Kenny drew first, blowing the smoke out the side of his mouth and then handing off to me. We could have used a good conversationalist to ease the mood, a third person with lots to say on every subject. Katy would have known what sort of joke to make. I had a hard time not crossing my eyes and holding the smoke in without vomiting it back up. After one hit, I choked as if I had swallowed a bag of lawn clippings, and by the third, I was hearing a hissing in my ears. Kenny took a final hit and dropped the ashes from the pipe into an ashtray and leaned into his chair. He closed his eyes and touched each string of his guitar, listening to the sound it made.

A curl of hair caught in the collar of his shirt. He made the notes he strummed sound agitated, interesting. The dark mixed up with the light in the room.

“Where’s Brent?” I asked when Kenny stopped to move his fingers along the frets.

“Fuck if I know,” he said.

“Is he my father?” I asked.

“The guy’s impotent,” Kenny said. “He had an accident when he was like six.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Yeah, sometime.” Kenny tapped a foot on the floor, counting.

“Does he leave you here by yourself a lot of nights?”

If there are two people in a room, I don’t believe there should be silence between them.

An angry line formed in Kenny’s forehead. Everything about him—especially his hunched posture—told me that he had filled a tank with venom and would fire it off if I stayed on the subject of his relations. I thought of bringing up the nights at home I waited for Mom. I considered talking about Natalie but stayed away from her because he was already treating me as if unflattering cousinly similarities existed.

He didn’t respect my cuteness; I might have left my rhinestone lesbian belt at home for the difference it seemed to make in his opinion of me. His anger at his family made my frustrations seem small. It wasn’t too late to head back and draw mustaches on Natalie’s puppy poster as a way to rebel.

“I met your uncle a few weeks ago,” I told Kenny.

“I don’t pay too much attention to who my fucking uncle knows,” Kenny said.

I had a suspicion that he could have kept a therapist busy discussing his dislike of the subject. I didn’t ask any more questions. My toes embarked on a life of their own. Normally, they reside in my shoes providing no contribution, but suddenly they were telling me they didn’t know whether they should lie flat or stretch out. For a while, Kenny didn’t play his guitar. He laid it in his lap. I finally looked from my feet to his face and noticed him staring at me. He was frowning. His expression suggested he might bite me.

“WANT TO HAVE SEX?” KENNY ASKED.

There should be flirting first, but Kenny’s proposal to Natalie suggested he maybe didn’t believe in waiting periods. Or he thought our Amy Winehouse discussion was all the warm-up he needed.

“Seriously?” I shifted on the squishy bed.

Kenny and I might have been a fine pair of mismatched pals up to mischief together.

“Well?” he asked.

He looked at me like he expected me to explain what was wrong with him, lay it on the table, because people harassed him for being wrong or criminal, and all he was begging for was what Steve received from girls as far-reaching into the arctic ice fields as Natalie. I was reminded of Ms. Duncan chasing down a runaway
quarter in the lunch room and stomping it with her foot. She had resilience or an underdog quality that didn’t quit when you hoped to escape her friendliness at the door to her classroom.

Kenny set his guitar against the wall and splashed down next to me on the bed. He did something with his face close to mine that was supposed to be kissing.

“You have nice tits, Sorenson,” he mumbled.

“Tits?” I asked, thinking the word unappreciative for a guy who was lucky to be playing more than just the role of trusty Goofy to my Minnie Mouse.

“What else would I call them?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

He had a pretty limited vocabulary. I couldn’t see Kenny speaking of “golden orbs,” the phrase most frequently used in the novels Nana read when she wasn’t vacuuming under the beds. “Boobs” were fake, as in “She has fake boobs,” and definitely didn’t describe what I had.

I settled on breasts.

“Tits.” He played with one outside my shirt.

It made them sound small, which they were.

We fell backward on the mattress, him pushing slightly and me becoming limp because his tit grabbing felt better than I expected. I pulled my hair from
under his elbow and shifted my hips so that he wasn’t right on me. The water displaced and slapped against the wood box frame. Kenny wrestled with the clasp of my bra, his fingertips flitting against the small of my back. He swore, muttered, cursed at his ineptness. Finally, he pushed his hands through the cups—there was plenty of room because I had started to go sock-less. We were now as far as I had gotten the last two times I tried to swan-dive into the pool of womanly experience.

“Wait,” I said. I thought about how to suggest that we watch television instead.

Kenny removed his shirt, and I caught a reek of dope, dirty clothes, and something spearminty underneath. He was skinny but strong, like life was tightly packed inside him. The smell of him, no kidding, it completely floored me. If I thought the dope had made me stoned, it was nothing compared to the rush I got from breathing in Kenny full-on. Weird because at school, like Natalie, I just thought he stank.

He rolled on top of me again. I plunged downward and was trapped unless I felt feisty enough to kick him. He started tugging my pants, pulling at them until he had them down around my knees. Simultaneously—the boy was all moves—he undulated out of his boxer
shorts and there it was, my first penis (besides pictures on the internet), my first naked boy, my first naked self. I knew to look carefully in case Katy wanted a description.

“Wow,” I said, hypnotized, trying to find a less complicated angle to view from.

Kenny smiled. It was like somebody turning on a bright light in a dark room. You wanted them to turn it off quickly so you could stuff a few things under your bed, but even so, you were ready to remember the flash behind your eyelids for a minute after it happened.

“You aren’t much like your cousin,” he said, which was encouragement enough for me to keep going.

“Have you had sex with Natalie, too?” I asked.

“Only in my dreams,” he said.

Kenny shifted from nuzzling my ear to bucking along to his own rhythm. My mind hiked on to the moral question of what God might be doing while I was underneath Kenny. I pictured God in heaven, wearing a headset listening to Al Gore, Earth’s guardian angel, while another phone rang on his desk—Sherry Wimple, calling to give him a tad of advice. Heaven was full of ringing phones and God was doing the best he could with the backlog, but let’s face it, some messages were likely to get lost.

“Stop,” I said to Kenny, realizing we had forgotten to use any protection.

“Wait, wait, wait!” I cried.

I knocked the pillow from underneath my head and rolled off the mattress so that instead of being propped, I was inverted, my naked thighs higher than my chest. A tsunami rolled across the bed.

“Jesus, Sorenson.” Kenny grabbed himself as we disengaged.

He looked down at me lying in his dirty clothes. He reached into the pile to search for something to clean the mess that he had made in the soft area below his rib cage.

I offered him a pair of his dirty underpants.

He wiped and adjusted himself and slid safely into a different pair. I yanked my sweatshirt over my head and did what I could with my bra, which was still clasped but twisted more sideways than frontways. We Sorensons had been enough of a pillar of civility in front of the Stockhausens that a reversal like the one Kenny experienced should have been a surprise, or an event he was willing to drop his indifference for. I watched him for a change in how he was thinking about me. He scooched over and sat on his bed. He pulled his dope and his pipe back out and started
packing himself another hit.

“At least I’m not going to have your baby,” I said.

“In a cornfield.” Kenny laughed in a way that made him sound like he might be in pain. The laugh was almost as big a surprise as the smile had been. He held the lighter over the bowl until the dope glowed.

Kenny and I hadn’t intertwined more than ten minutes, but even so he managed to make me laugh too. I imagined Kenny in the cornfield helping Natalie have a baby, her bag of waters breaking, a smelly mess suddenly staining her clothes. He and I were both in the same seminaked state, partners in our universal insignificance to God, who had dropped the ball in letting a tragedy like Baby Grace take place. Kenny coughed and tried inhaling a second time without the laughing or crying or whatever he had done after the injury I had caused him.

His hand shook as he rolled his bag of dope and slipped it into a drawer. Though he wore a black bracelet with studs and a T-shirt with a satanic symbol, he wasn’t one to be running around cutting umbilical cords every day.

I began to wonder what Baby Grace would have been like to hold. I pictured her mewling and gurgling like a wet kitten. She would be tiny and grayish
blue, like something that grew under a board or a mossy tree root.

“Jesus, Sorenson,” Kenny muttered, maybe seeing my eyes mist.

“I wouldn’t have left her if I knew she was going to…” he started to explain, but stopped to watch me reorganize the bed. I placed the pillows at the top and straightened the sheets and the comforter. Tossing them into the laundry once this century might have been a good idea, but perhaps the Stockhausens were as concerned as I was about the number of phosphates in the water supply. They were geniuses of conservation.

When I finished with the bed, he tugged me close to him. I wasn’t sure, now that we had taken things as far as we had, whether I shouldn’t make my exit, get while the getting was simple. We lay on our stomachs, the water from the bed cold underneath, his body warm next to me where our legs were naked. We talked about English class and how he planned to fail it. I asked whether he had ever done anything reckless to a cat besides chase it with a firecracker. It was too bad I injured him to make him like me.

Kenny was the first thing to happen in a month that made me feel special. He seemed to like me even though I wasn’t trying very hard. He rearranged the television set so we could see the picture. We both noticed the
big neon cross on top of Pastor Jim’s church shedding a blue light around a reporter who, even with the sound off, I could tell was talking about Baby Grace.

“Maybe they caught someone,” I stated.

“Doubt it,” Kenny said.

“The usual suspect was getting laid tonight.” I poked him in the side.

“Me?” he said. “You.”

He flashed another smile.

Apparently, smoking dope makes people laugh a pitch higher. Kenny and I sounded like parakeets until he sat and adjusted the antenna. We laughed until I had to wipe spit off the side of my mouth. On the television, the reporter took statements from people shifting from foot to foot, cupping their hands around candles that had mostly blown out. Natalie lingered among them, her nose bright from the excitement. She was near the front, standing by a flagpole. Just behind her, Pastor Jim looked diminished by her radiant light, cold and shy away from the pulpit.

“Her holiness,” Kenny said.

Natalie did seem to be taking some sort of a screen test, preparing an audition tape for a large, important Oscar-winning role. Hopefully she would remember us little people now that she was having her big break. Was that a glisten I spotted on her cheek, reflecting
in the neon light? I tried to turn the channel because I didn’t want to watch my cousin’s performance, but Kenny pulled my hand away. When he let go, I chewed on the back of my thumb.

Heaven looked disjointed on the screen, smaller and flatter. All those viewers on their couches in Des Moines must be laughing at its single Main Street and the dent in the aluminum siding of the church. Just when I thought I couldn’t look anymore at its depressing smallness, Kenny’s uncle Brent swerved into the frame. He must have been searching for the cameraman. He grinned into the screen, a jack-o’-lantern with three missing teeth.

“Look,” I said, because Kenny seemed distracted by a pot seed he was picking off his bed.

Brent was wearing a Widow Seeds cap, and he curled his lip like a horse who smelled something funny. He clutched his shoe, pretending it was a microphone.

“Yippee, Uncle Brent,” Kenny said.

“He’s hilarious,” I remarked. Katy would have loved him.

“He’s an ass. I wish a truck would flatten him.”

“You don’t really hate him that much, do you?” I asked.

“All my life I’ve wanted to do it with a Sorenson.”
Kenny lowered his voice.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t the Sorenson he was speaking of, and I have to say the realization didn’t swallow like a gel cap. It implied a misunderstanding of my person that went deeper than calling my breasts “tits.” But then again, how could Kenny have perceived the real me when I hadn’t exactly locked that one down myself? I was still uncovering new layers, finding new parts of my personality suddenly springing from nowhere. I didn’t bare a resemblance to Tina Louise. I admitted that when I looked at my naked body, and unless I took supplements that enhanced more than my brain, I probably never would.

I consoled myself that “doing it with a Sorenson” represented some sort of higher, purer dream that existed out of Kenny’s grasp, and when he settled down, he might just realize that what he had was pretty excellent without the extra padding.

He rolled away from the television. When the tidal eruption eased, I inspected his belly button—a deep, dark innie. Mine was still raw from where I removed a piercing that hadn’t panned out. I shuffled to the headboard too. I wondered if it was OK to be the cousin of the girl next door or if I was relinquishing my shot at an adventurous life by dropping
out of some vital competition. I gazed upon Kenny with eyes that I hoped were filled with incandescent light but which were probably bloodshot. Before I had a chance to flutter my eyelashes, he moved closer. This time, because I had maimed him earlier, and we were more stoned, and we didn’t have an exact destination in mind, we went about our business carefully.

Kenny reached for a condom in the blue bowl with the pennies. I had thought the packets were cold medicine, but if I had known they were condoms, I might have tried to unrip one and put it into play sooner. Katy had done a banana demonstration for me in Des Moines to show me how rubbers worked, and I had laughed myself sick, spitting the soda I happened to be drinking. The thing out of its case was all slimy and rubbery, and I didn’t think I wanted to touch it.

Kenny handled the trick of slipping it on and rolling it down himself, perhaps no longer quite trusting me to get too close. He didn’t have an easy time and fell back on some of the same choice vocabulary he used to deal with my bra. The second time we merged, despite the feel of latex, I crossed over. I rode a white horse, maybe even a unicorn or Pegasus (since
wings seemed to be involved), as it leaped through a rainbow from a dark glade into light.

“Wow,” I said to Kenny.

He ran his hand through the hair along my forehead and kissed my head.

Afterward, I don’t know how long we lay there. I lost all sense of time. I would have bought the Brooklyn Bridge if he tried to sell it to me. I fell asleep against his chest, experiencing a deeper slumber than I had in weeks. Sex is a serious drug that maybe should be regulated.

When I woke up from the state of oblivion I had slipped into, the water mattress was slapping against itself.

“Sh.” Kenny put his hand to my mouth, though I hadn’t said anything.

A door slammed, and boots thudded in the hallway.

“When I call you, you better answer!” Brent shouted. I looked for him on the television and realized he was much closer.

I grabbed for my pants and held them against my naked legs. I had been asleep for an hour or longer. Brent had returned from the vigil drunk and was now trying to get Kenny to open his bedroom door. Kenny raised his hand to his mouth to signal me not
to speak or let Brent know I was there. He was more startled than I was.

“I’ll be right out,” he said to the rattling doorknob.

“Hurry, you little shit.” Brent rattled again.

Kenny had locked us in. He rushed around in search of his jeans, hopping on one foot to get them on. I was hurrying too, wiggling into my pants while the bed sloshed underneath me. Even though Kenny was standing right next to it, he didn’t help by handing me my shirt.