The Adults (20 page)

Mr. Basketball was having me over two, sometimes three, nights a week. I used the fire escape to get in.

When I got inside, the bathwater was running.

“What took you so long?” Mr. Basketball asked.

“I have homework, you know,” I said.

Mr. Basketball liked to watch me bathe. I rubbed the soap over my breasts and he watched from the doorway. “You are so beautiful,” he said. “I can’t stand it.” He stood by the toilet and dropped his pants. His penis hung large and twenty-six years old against his thigh. He lit a vanilla candle on his sink. He climbed in the warm soapy water, and I measured our waists with my eye. Mine was half the size of his. I laid my head against the back of the white tub. I put my hands around his waist and on his butt.

“You have hair on your ass,” I said.

“I know that,” he said. We laughed. I felt the coarse hairs with my fingertips.

He put his mouth on me under the water. I liked him better this way. Clean. Sterile. There was nothing dangerous about a naked man in water. Even though he weighed one hundred and seventy pounds he felt as weightless as a bedsheet. There was nothing he could do to me in water that wouldn’t wash away. I held on to the sides of the bath with my hands, and his touch was different. He was an unpredictable fusion of body and water, and even with all the pressure on us, I could hardly feel him.

The water rose as he moved up my torso with his head, some of it filling my ears so when he came up for air and spoke, his voice was muffled. “Bub bum boat on bib,” he said, pointing to his dick, which was now lying on top of my chest like a hot dog. I sat up out of the water.

“
What?
” I asked.

The candle flame throbbed behind us.

“Rub some soap on it,” he said.

I climbed out of the tub.

“That’s barbaric,” I said.

“What? The soap makes it more sensitive.”

I rubbed my legs with the towel. “I’m dating someone,” I told him.

“What?” he said. “Who?”

I stood there naked. The oil from the tub made the water bead down my chest.

“Daniel Blank, right?” Mr. Basketball asked. “With the lip ring? I’ve seen you two together a lot lately.”

“We’re almost in love.”

“We call him Lip Ring Boy in the lunchroom,” Mr. Basketball said. “He’s nice. Apparently, not very good at chemistry.”

He climbed out of the tub.

“You’re a terrible teacher,” I said, and this made him pull me close and kiss me hard until my back hurt and his beard scraped my lips and my cheeks were wet from his hands. I was on his sink now, my legs separated by his hips.

“Don’t do this to me,” Mr. Basketball said, holding the ends of my long wet brown hair. “Don’t date boys. Don’t date Daniel Blank.”

“I like boys,” I said. “Boys don’t have hair on their asses.”

“Don’t be cruel like this, Emily.”

But I didn’t like boys. Boys never made sense to me. Their bones were too long for their skin, their acne-faces so red and wilting, they were too embarrassed to look you in the eye, too embarrassed not to look you in the eye, their mouse voices you could barely hear over the music, which was always blasting in my ear. Their breath was irregular and scentless, these boys were always overbrushing their teeth and overminting their mouths in cars, always playing music with no detectable melody, and no matter how long you listened, they never successfully communicated anything. I hated sitting in cars, and on couches, and hugging with closed fists. I liked beards and full calves and throaty, fire-crackling voices that crashed right into my throat, I liked men who tasted like something, who were a part of the world, who felt heavy on my chest, Mr. Basketball warm inside me.

He put his hand on the back of my neck, and I held on to the towel rack. The screenless window was wide open at my head, and I waited for the air to fill my ears, the tiny mosquitoes to come sink their teeth into my cheeks, to suck out all the evil that was in my blood, and before I felt any of this kind of healing, Mr. Basketball whispered in my ear, “You are so good.” He kissed me on the mouth.

“There is nothing better than this,” he said, and I worried he was right. I worried that once something had entered you, it would never leave—he would plant himself inside me and grow and grow until I was nothing but him. I held on to the sides of his body, and as he came, I heard a tiny push of breath in my ear and we nearly cried.

Mr. Basketball dropped me off at the end of my street and while I sprinted through the dark to my house, the yard felt predatory, but I was full inside. I didn’t even care that I was going to be in trouble. I knew my mother was already home because I knew she didn’t really have it in her to date a blind man; as much as she would have liked to believe her heart was as golden as that of our new neighbor Mrs. Wallaby, who was married to a quadriplegic, we both knew my mother wouldn’t go home with Gary. She didn’t want to be the one who had to drive, or open the door, or boil the tea.

“Your hair is wet, Emily,” my mother shouted as I ran up the stairs. “Why is your hair wet?”

“I liked Gary,” I shouted back, and shut my bedroom door.

After Gary, my mother didn’t go on any more dates. She was back to her bed again. She was almost forty, she complained. She was back to the therapist, a new therapist. Seeing this one two times a week now.

The more my mother saw the therapist, the more sex I had with Mr. Basketball, about three times a week at this point, and during my health class I worried that perhaps it was too much sex, that perhaps tampons would someday be too small for me. I wished somebody would have asked our health teacher Mrs. Blumenthal if something like this was even possible, so I could know if I was being ridiculous or not, but nobody did. Only Leroy Hannah spoke in health, raised his hand to ask Mrs. Blumenthal if vaginitis was the condition of constantly having a vagina, if there was any documented case of a cheerleader getting pregnant while doing a leg kick, and she just shook her head, reminded us that it only took one little sperm to make life bloom inside you; too many girls my age gave birth without even knowing they were pregnant, fetuses drop from our hips like underwear, “and it’s an awful thing,” Mrs. Blumenthal said. “A kind of murder.” Then she passed out a test issued by the government with questions nobody could understand:

Most genital infections are transient, producing no sequelae (True?)

Where do condoms come from? (Trees?)

The female condom can be inserted into the vagina for how long before vaginal intercourse? (Condoms can be
female
?)

Mr. Basketball and I never had sex with condoms, male or female. We tried, but there was always an excuse; the condom was too far under the bed, or he bought the wrong kinds, or etc., etc., etc. I pressed down on my stomach and it felt harder than usual. How could I have been so stupid? Nobody was this stupid. I sat at my desk and convinced myself I was pregnant. I went to the bathroom, sure that you immediately detected anything foreign inside you, rubbed my hand over my stomach until I felt a giant, hard bulge swell between my hips.

I rubbed my breasts. The flab was tender. But my breasts had been tender since I had gotten breasts. I put my finger to my underwear. It was wet. Janice would have known what this meant, but Janice wouldn’t even look at me anymore. She walked down the hallway with Brittany now and ignored my gaze, the two of them in matching brown boots, the two of them growing out their hair and nibbling on ecstasy pills between class, spreading rumors: Emily Vidal has regular sex with Satan.

I waited at Mr. Basketball’s car after school.

“You can’t wait at my car like this, Emily,” Mr. Basketball said.

“I’m pregnant,” I said.

“Jesus,” he said. “In the car.”

We got in the car.

“You’re not pregnant,” he said.

“How would you know?”

“I’ve only come inside you once,” he said.

“So,” I said, furious. “If you shot me in the head once, I’d still be dead.”

We were silent until Lake Avenue.

“I’m seventeen,” I said. “That’s when my body wants me to have a baby.”

“If you are so concerned take a pregnancy test,” he said. “But you’re not pregnant. Do you know how many times I’ve ejaculated inside a woman and not gotten her pregnant?”

“You’re disgusting,” I said. “That’s a disgusting thing to say.”

“I’m trying to reason with you here,” he said.

At Stop and Shop, he said, “I’d go in with you, but . . .”

“I can walk from here, thanks,” I said, and gave him the finger.

“Emily,” he said. “Please calm down.”

I walked away, determined to hate him forever. In the grocery line, I put a pregnancy test and a stalk of broccoli on the conveyor belt.

“Twelve fifty,” the cashier said.

“I only have ten dollars,” I said.

She removed the stalk of broccoli. “Ten dollars and five cents. I’ll cover the five.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

I couldn’t wait until I got all the way home to find out if I was pregnant, so I ran through the woods between the two main streets of my town, Lake and Bolt, and squatted behind an oak tree. I urinated on the stick and some splashed on my pants around my ankles and I closed my eyes. “It will be okay,” I repeated to myself, as I waited for the two pink lines to appear. “It will be okay.” Mary or Martha or Katherine or Geneva will be a lovely girl, I thought, nothing at all like myself, she will have long blond hair, and she won’t cry at night, and she will eat tuna sandwiches without complaint, she will read the entire newspaper every morning and she will never date boys who don’t have a GPA of 3.5 or higher, she will wear wool socks and polish her toes and she will emerge from my womb acutely aware of the fact that a female condom is an internal device used to prevent pregnancy and can be inserted in the vagina at least eight hours before vaginal intercourse.

Negative.

I threw the stick to the ground and ran all the way to Mr. Basketball’s apartment.

I arrived breathless. He was behind his screen door, biting on a carrot.

“I’m not pregnant,” I said.

“Come in,” he said, opening the door for me.

His apartment was a tiny condo in a complex next to the commuter parking lot. It was carpeted, brand-new, and bare of anything essential, but at first, this was what I liked about it. I was impressed by the mere idea of having your own home and never feeling compelled to fill up the space. This was a good sign. He was a man who kept only what he needed and that included me. I walked around the apartment thinking, Wow, this is where your microwave could be. Wow, this is where you could have a fruit basket. This is where the light could hit the mirror on your blue walls and make everything feel like the outside.

Mr. Basketball had a slab of beef on the counter. He cut the meat into squares. He was going to make a stew, he said. He was upset. He was throwing chunks of butter into a pot. He sliced carrots on a board. He wanted to know why I behaved the way I did earlier.

“Don’t say ‘behave,’” I said.

He said he understood I was young, he knew that and was ready to deal with that, and I said, “Deal with my youth? Like that’s the problem?” I asked.

“I know this is scary for you,” he said.

He said it was scary for him too. “Don’t you understand that?” he asked. “I’m a part of this. I’m a person.”

I dragged my hand across his chest and unzipped his fly.

“No,” I said.

I put his penis in my mouth, and I could still hear him above saying, “This is scary.” I heard him slide the carrots into the pot. They sizzled. His life hung by a thread when he was around me, and we both knew this. I could be anyone I wanted around him, my good self, my hateful self, my needy and terrible self, and he would love me because at the core, I was a young girl with long brown hair and as I continued to hold him in my mouth, the quieter he became, the better we both felt.

He slid down the kitchen cabinets and took my face in his hands. “Jesus,” he said. “You are so young.”

He had red wine teeth. I wiped his mouth with my fingers.

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I’m seventeen. In a different century, I would already know how to skin a chicken with my teeth and feed four children off my breasts and have five years left to live.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Are you staying for dinner?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes I am.”

We ate at his kitchen table and over the silence of the meal, it occurred to me that even though I’d just held his semen in my mouth—“babies,” I had joked while I inspected the fluid like a scientist—we had never eaten together before. I had never seen him take his knife and fork and cut into his steak, just as he had never seen me drag a carrot across my plate. He was sipping on wine and I was drinking water. I reached out for his wineglass and drank some. This made us both nervous.

“Thanks for dinner,” I said. “You’re a real Batali.”

He smiled.

“You don’t even know who that is, do you?” I asked, imitating the tone he used to ask questions of Lillian Biggs, who never ever knew the answer in English class.

“Fat man,” he said. “White shirt.”

It was official: it didn’t matter what I knew. It didn’t matter if I read the dictionary from front to back or if I could conduct a twenty-minute conversation in Spanish or solve a math problem with three variables. It didn’t matter if I learned how to get my mother to stop crying at night (hand on back, goofy grin on face) or if my legs grew thin, my breasts sturdy and reliable things, my face strong and lean now, my skin tightening at each cheekbone (eat a cheeseburger, my mother kept saying). It didn’t matter if Mr. Basketball and I had sex backward or forward or with my knees at my ears or if I swallowed or spat or
put soap on it
, it didn’t matter how careful both of us had been never to mention the word “rape”—there would never be one thing I knew that Mr. Basketball didn’t already know. This was why all of our teachers and parents warned us about getting involved with adults; this was why they passed out sexual abuse pamphlets during school assemblies and grown-up women perched on stools and talked about the time that Benny (the uncle) showed his penis to Karen (the ten-year-old) and that when Benny put his privates to Karen’s privates (privates being anything that was normally covered by a bathing suit) it felt good, Karen told all five hundred of us in the auditorium, even though it also felt bad.