The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (20 page)

As it grew later, the commercials dwindled and the story began to seem real, and it got creepy. Margie and I kept exchanging drunken glances in the jumping glow, seeing ourselves in the characters, the same as you sometimes believe a song on the radio is meant especially for you. After a scare that made even me jump, Margie clenched a wad of my shirt in each fist and tugged with every stab of music or ominous close-up, shutting her eyes against the worst moments. Robin Graves returned and made fun of the movie, but Margie was still stiff against me.

Later the Cat Woman’s rival went swimming in an indoor pool at night, water reflections slicing at the walls and ceiling. The panther crept in and paced the lip of the pool as the woman paddled, panicking, in the deep center of the pool. Margie began crying against me, and the movie shrank into the distant box of the TV.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Can you please turn it off? I can’t stand to watch anything scary right now, because of my nerves.”

I didn’t want to stop the movie. I wanted the mystery solved, and also the TV was like a third person in the room who lessened my duty towards Margie. But I rolled off the bed and extinguished it, the tiny fading eye of the picture dying in a blink. I flipped on the light.

Margie was curled on the bed with her eyes squeezed shut
and her arms around herself, whispering, “I’m so awful,” with tears tracking unaccustomed mascara down her face.

I touched her back and said, “Margie, it’s off. What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s horrible.” Her voice was high and tiny like a small child’s, and slurred from the wine. “It feels like the eyes of the posters are watching me, even though I know that’s stupid. I just feel scared.” She swallowed and looked up at me with her eyes filling and lips trembling, and I felt coldhearted for noticing that her earrings and teardrops flashed with the same exact sparkle. She said, “You think I lied about the ghost to get you up here with me, don’t you? But I didn’t. Either she’s real, or I’m crazy.”

Margie was shivering now, and had the hiccups again. I hadn’t even thought about the ghost once. I said, of course, “You’re not crazy.”

“Well, I’m so scared of being crazy,” she hiccupped, “that I’m going crazy from worrying.”

“Well it doesn’t worry me. Be crazy if you want. Just relax.”

She sank into the corner of the bed against the slanted wall and the headboard and watched herself across in the mirror as if it was someone dangerous. I didn’t entirely understand and wasn’t sure how to involve myself. Maybe I should go home and leave her alone, I thought, since I wasn’t helping. I lifted the wine bottle and drank what was left, then started into the champagne, though I’d begun seeing two of everything and sensed nausea behind the deadened wall of myself. Still afraid to go to bed with her, I figured drunkenness was the least sissy way to avoid it.

Margie said, “I know you feel weird around me. I’m bad and horrible.” Tears leapt from her lashes. “Everybody hates Donny and thinks he’s the bad one. But I made him do it to me.” She wept at the mirror, hiccupping. “I tricked him one night when he was stoned, and then I blackmailed him into doing it all the time. And I loved it, it’s all I thought about. I’m much, much
worse than him, and I don’t see how you can stand me.” She dropped her head, sobbing in a whisper.

I’d already digested the softer version of this that she’d told me in the park, and like my hernia, my brother’s brain damage, and the knowledge that death is the world’s landlord, I’d begun to live with it. But she refused to forgive herself.

She continued to hiccup, and her face was smeared with mascara. “You know, I used to sit alone in my room every day doing nothing, thinking awful things. I felt like I was the only true person in the world, like everybody else was a robot put here to test me.”

“I’ve felt like that before,” I said. “Have you been to a psychiatrist?”

“They made me go. All the doctor did was ask me questions about the divorce and all. He kept telling me I was normal, which is bullshit. And he gave me pills that made me feel dumb and sleepy.”

“Maybe you were just caught up in your own imagination. I got the idea, one time, that I had stomach cancer. And worrying about it made my stomach hurt more. For six months I believed I had cancer, then I got my hernia and worried about that instead.” I felt I was so drunk I wasn’t making sense. She didn’t seem to be listening.

“When I couldn’t get Donny in here—” She hiccupped again and the crying got worse, “—I’d use my fingers and think about him or some other boy. Or my dad … sometimes worse stuff…” She knocked the back of her skull against the wall. “God! I’m so messed up!”

She got up and lurched over to the mirror and sat down hard in the chair. She stopped crying, put out her finger, and touched her mirror finger. “I think I look ugly and awful. I don’t know why you came here.”

“You don’t have to tell me all this stuff,” I said. “If everybody did everything that came into their heads, we’d all be waiting on the electric chair.”

She stared into the mirror, and seemed to me very selfconsciously dramatic, like she was doing something she’d seen in a movie. I realized that she was so locked up in herself that everything she did seemed important, that her crimes were too big ever to be forgiven. I was a little angry by then, and so drunk I couldn’t sit straight, but I drank the champagne down to the bottom. I thought if I ignored her now she might remember I existed. I braced on the mattress and stared at the rolling carpet. I heard a whack and the cat shot between my feet under the bed.

Margie was pounding the mirror with open hands. I stumbled over, grabbed her wrists where the razor scars were. She made fists and strained groaning towards the glass and said, “Don’t touch me!” I looked at her face in the mirror and was startled at my own image.

I’ve always encountered myself as a stranger, an unfamiliar boy in photographs, reflections. It’s not the same me I recognize in dreams. I knew I didn’t like this boy either, I couldn’t even stand the way he looked, drunk and dopey and standing around while this little girl indulged in hysterics. I let go of Margie’s wrists and she smacked the glass hard, and a crack ran from one corner to its diagonal opposite.

What I did next began as an accident. I thought it, and then I was doing it before I could stop. I punched my mirror face. Pieces fell on the vanity table, a noise that made me angrier, enraged at my own violent stupidity. Margie gasped. The boy didn’t vanish, he scattered into fragments, and I punched the mirror again and again, the same animal rhythm my father used when he beat me, a sick crashing ecstasy with the glass all falling, Margie tugging back on my waist, until I was thudding wood, leaving dull bloodstains. I swung my elbow and the mirror frame jumped cracking against the wall.

You can’t kill your reflection. Each shard contained another version.

I felt that the door had opened behind me. Donny was framed there in an attitude of shock, but still chewing something, his
arm in a fresh white cast. Margie was half on the floor, attached to my waist, a seductress clinging to her barbarian on the cover of a pulp novel. Donny swallowed hugely, like a python, and said, “I heard a noise up here. Are y’all okay?” then fastened his eyes on mine as I nodded feebly and the pain came into my hands. Donny turned and closed the door behind him with great politeness.

My mind still smoking, I slid nicked fingers through Margie’s hair. My knuckles were cut, not badly. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “Feel any better now?” Somehow I did.

She said, “In a way, I guess. I think you stopped my hiccups.”

I offered to pay for the damage, having only about three dollars in the world. She said not to worry about it, that I should see her brothers’ rooms.

Several hushed male voices deliberated in the hall below the stairway. It was important to me that no older boys come in, pseudo-parents who might reduce me to a drunken kid helping a disturbed little girl destroy furniture. I didn’t want to hear this was silly, or I’d better go home now, or that I was in more trouble. Margie stepped over to the door and dropped the latch in its eyelet.

I got down on the crackling floor (it seemed natural at the time) and sprawled on my back. Margie brushed some shards away with her shoe and got down beside me. I saw there were glow-in-the-dark stars pasted on the ceiling.

“My head is so jumbled up,” Margie said.

I nodded my head, as if I understood.

“Don’t agree,” she pleaded. “Contradict me.”

I tried to dredge up some wisdom to apply to this. “You never know what’s enough until you know what’s more than enough,” I said.

Her forehead wrinkled and smoothed, and she breathed evenly. “That sort of makes sense. You mean, it’s like all the people who make up the rules to begin with, they’re the ones who went too far and know where everybody else ought to
stop.” She turned towards me, a smile washing up on her face. “You’re smart.”

“I got that from Tim, who got it from William Blake—a poet who made these religious comic books in the old days.”

“Well, that’s better than anything the doctor told me.”

“He was probably trying to make you regular. Some people need to learn how to be unusual, how to work on the good parts of it and not let the rest worry you. I’m not exactly regular, which is why I like you, even though you’re crazy and you’re driving me crazy, as you can see.” I swept a hand through the air, indicating general destruction.

She giggled, after all of that.

We lay on the carpet, staring at the ceiling. I pushed myself up and slapped the light switch off, then rolled back down and held Margie’s hand. The stars on the ceiling glowed pale green. Margie put an arm and a leg across me and, wet with tears, kissed my ear. But I tensed.

“Margie, I really love you.” Drunk, this was easy to say. “But I think I’m too, um, messed up to—you know—do anything.” I was scared to even give it a name, especially the standard, “make love,” which you heard every three minutes on the radio.

“That’s okay,” she said, removing her arm and leg. “It’s probably best, considering what got me into all this mess in the first place.” She kissed my cheek and sighed. “Sometimes I feel like I got my life backwards.” Then, after a while, “I see colored sparkles in the dark. Can you see them?”

“Yeah.” I saw them every night, like private fireworks, even with my eyes closed. “I guess it’s just stuff inside our eyes. Rods or cones or whatever.”

The cat had reappeared, slinking tentatively around us, and now I felt her tongue on my knuckles, a warm rasp against the drying blood.

“Francis,” Margie said, “tell me the most amazing thing you ever heard.”

I pondered, then said, “There’s this fish that lives at the bottorn
of the ocean, and it has a spine sticking out of its head with a light at the tip, to lure prey. The females are the glowing ones, the males are smaller. Well—” I almost yawned. “—after the male fish hatch they bite onto a female. They’re like parasites. But after a while their bodies grow into each other, and they share the same blood and everything.” My skin pinched into goose bumps thinking about this. “They turn into one single fish.”

“Wow,” said Margie drowsily. “That’s really weird.”

Our heads were touching, and it seemed like her thoughts were jumping into my brain faster than they could travel to her own heart. I turned my face to her and her mouth was against mine in a very tender kiss that grew warmer, more desperate, her mouth changing from soft to loose and wet and then wide open, tongue hard, her hands squeezing my shoulder and my arm. The hair on my neck tingled. Because I knew we weren’t taking this to its adult conclusion, I didn’t mind going right up to the edge, peering over, safe against the plunge.

I kissed her and she tilted her head back, offering me her throat, and her breathing quickened whenever I licked or nibbled. She slid her hands down my back, untucked my shirt, and eased one hand up my back and the other into the waistband of my jeans. She was squirming under me now, and I found that I was squirming too. I took tiny bites of her shoulder, and she gasped at my ear and then her tongue slid inside, an odd squishy cave-sound, and every nerve in my body stood up and shivered. We writhed against each other.

“Ow! Stop!” she cried.

“What’d I do?”

“I’m on a piece of glass. Ouch. Let’s get on the bed.”

We repositioned ourselves and started again. My hands found her bare waist and stroked up under her shirt to her small, clothcupped breasts. Her hand wriggled into my underwear, slightly uncomfortable, but I got used to it. I eased my fingers under the bra and discovered her nipples, urgently hard in the soft mounds
of her breasts. She leaned up and crooked her arm around and unsnapped her bra, then maneuvered it off her shoulders and out through the sleevehole around one arm, smiling at me like an accomplice.

I touched her in ways that seemed dangerous at first, then became automatic and necessary. I lifted her shirt, heart thundering at the view, and stroked her and kissed the dark rings at each tip, took an entire breast into my mouth. She tugged her shirt off over her head, underarms white, vulnerable looking, and sloping to shoulder and breast in that smooth exciting connection that makes every part of a girl’s body look delicious. I got some cat hair on my lips and had to stop and take it off. I asked Margie where she learned all the things she was doing.

She moved a hand to my shirt and dipped each button out of its slot, opened the shirt and pulled me against her. She whispered, “I read Mama’s copy of
The Sensuous Woman.”

Completely lost now, I pressed my middle against hers, thrilled that she ground back against me, all the time running my hands over her soft rounded chest and the cotton panties at her hips where the dress had hiked. I shifted, ran my hand down the front of her miniskirt, Margie staring up at me like a victim, mouth wide, belly muscles jumping, and then, with my heart threatening to kill me, I placed my hand in the shockingly soft, hot, damp pout between her legs. She closed her eyes, reached down and squeezed me through two layers of cloth.

I smelled her beneath the perfume now, an odd familiar scent that reminded me of baby powder. She pulled away from a kiss to pick some cat fuzz from her mouth. I found the elastic of her panties and slid my hand under and down into the short coarser hair, the plump junction of thighs, belly, and ass, and my finger slipped across the hot slippery mouth, unbelievable to me in its hungry warmth, and then inside of her. Margie moaned and unsnapped my jeans, yanked the zipper and tugged my underwear down and wrapped her fingers around me, pumping. “Not quite
so hard,” I said, breathlessly, “and a little faster.” With her other hand she guided the heel of my hand against her, above my plunging finger, and I understood to press small circles there.