The Worst Years of Your Life (20 page)

I told Jennings that Garrett was in my math class and he said he knew since the two of them had kept in touch after Garrett's expulsion. Apparently he had gone on to spend time in a juvenile home, where a therapist suggested it was his mother he hated and not me, and that my weight had simply provoked him into attacking me because his mother was fat, too.

“Is that true?” I asked Jennings as we walked down the street together one fall morning. The dewy air reminded me of lying in the tub with him after sex, when the mirrors were all fogged up and the whole place smelled like a greenhouse. It wasn't something I would do again, but the memory of it made me think I had made the right choice at the time.

“Absolutely,” Jennings said, pulling the choke chain on his mutt, Robbie, while Edna, my miniature terrier, looked on in horror. “He feels just terrible about the mix-up.”

“So that's it? He's cured?” I said.

Jennings nodded. “Probably even more so now that you've lost all this weight.”

Edna sidled up to a Cutlass Supreme, sniffed the back tire, then peed beside it. When she was finished, Robbie peed on top of her pee. Jennings and I watched without saying a word. Bodily fluids were of little consequence to the likes of us. “Well, he's good in math,” I said finally, offering what little evidence I had of Garrett's reform.

Jennings turned to me then and dangled the end of Robbie's leash in my face. “You are getting very sleepy,” he warned.

“What?” I said.

“Your eyelids are getting very heavy,” he continued. “Soon you will fall asleep.”

“Stop it, Jennings,” I said, walking ahead.

He gave up and fell in beside me. “Sorry, Roz. It's just that Garrett asked me if I would hypnotize you so you'd have sex with him in the girls' rest room.”

“I see,” I said, panicking slightly at the thought of being sold again.

“He says he won't hurt you if you say no, but if you just give him a chance he thinks he could make you feel really good.” He put a hand in his pocket then to hide the erection he had gotten.

“I don't do that anymore,” I said weakly.

“Why not?” Jennings asked, surprised. “I do.”

I shifted my gaze from his crotch to his face. “With who?”

He shrugged. “Different girls.”

“Well,” I said, feeling suddenly morose, “hypnotism doesn't work anyway.”

“Sure it does,” he said. “Just look at you.”

I looked at Edna instead, who was digging a small hole in Jennings's front yard, where we had ended up, while Robbie sniffed her butt. From her kitchen window, I could see Ms. Jennings peering out at us; I didn't have to look at my own house to know my mother was at her post as well. “Spell
hypnotism,
” I said to Jennings for old times' sake, and he did so incorrectly, replacing the N with an M. We began to laugh, and in an instant his mother was at the front door, calling her son inside.

The next day in math class I felt a tug at the back of my hair. It was painless and affectionate and I dared not turn around.

“Yes?” Mr. Alvarez said a few minutes later, looking over my head at Garrett, who presumably had his hand up.

Garrett cleared his throat. “May I please go to the rest room?”

Mr. Alvarez nodded and Garrett got out of his seat to collect the wooden hall pass on the teacher's desk.

I waited as long as I could before asking permission to use the rest room as well.

“No,” Mr. Alvarez said. “Wait until Garrett comes back.”

“But I can't wait,” I said. “I have to go
now.
”

This was a new liberty we girls had begun to take in high school, meaning we would not be responsible for bleeding all over the classroom floor should our teachers not take heed. I had gotten my first period a month after Jennings and I stopped making love, and though I didn't have it that very day, Mr. Alvarez nodded knowingly and filled out a paper pass.

In the rest room I waited for another girl to wash her hands and leave before checking all the stalls. Garrett was in the last one, standing on the toilet seat. “
Alcatraz,
” he said softly. His voice was deeper than it had once been, his erection more forthright. He would not swim around inside me like a fish.

I stepped inside the stall and locked the door behind me. I had always been too afraid to scrutinize him before—even that time in Jennings's when we exchanged ideas about the end of the world—and so now I couldn't help but take him in. It seemed a kind of miracle that we should be so close without harm passing between us.

“
Alcatraz,
” he mentioned again after a short while, to remind me of why I was there, but he needn't have. It would be years before I would stop feeling grateful for my safety, before I would notice the ache in my tailbone warning me of unworthy men or bad weather.

For now, my only concern were the bulging blue-green veins running along his muscular forearms. As I held my breath and reached out to touch one of them, it quivered, like Edna's twiggy back legs when she was cold. I gripped the arm and used it to steady myself as I stepped up onto the toilet, where I found his cheek to be prickly and the bottoms of his earlobes like feathers between my fingertips. The hair was still yellow, and when I put my face into it and inhaled, the answer was gardenia. I held both forearms now, though I could not remember when I had taken the second one, and they gripped me protectively in return. The lips were wet and frightened as they came toward me, while inside the mouth, the teeth made tentative, idle threats.

I
'M DATING
B
ARBIE
. T
HREE AFTERNOONS A WEEK, WHILE MY
sister is at dance class, I take Barbie away from Ken. I'm practicing for the future.

At first I sat in my sister's room watching Barbie, who lived with Ken, on a doily, on top of the dresser.

I was looking at her but not really looking. I was looking, and all of a sudden realized she was staring at me.

She was sitting next to Ken, his khaki-covered thigh absently rubbing her bare leg. He was rubbing her, but she was staring at me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

“I'm Barbie,” she said, and Ken stopped rubbing her leg.

“I know.”

“You're Jenny's brother.”

I nodded. My head was bobbing up and down like a puppet on a weight.

“I really like your sister. She's sweet,” Barbie said. “Such a good little girl. Especially lately, she makes herself so pretty, and she's started doing her nails.”

I wonder if Barbie noticed that Miss Wonderful bit her nails and that when she smiled her front teeth were covered with little flecks of purple nail polish. I wondered if she knew Jennifer colored in the chipped chewed spots with purple Magic Marker, and then sometimes sucked on her fingers so that not only did she have purple flecks of polish on her teeth, but her tongue was the strangest shade of violet.

“So listen,” I said. “Would you like to go out for a while? Grab some fresh air, maybe take a spin around the backyard?”

“Sure,” she said.

I picked her up by her feet. It sounds unusual but I was too petrified to take her by the waist. I grabbed her by the ankles and carried her off like a Popsicle stick.

As soon as we were out back, sitting on the porch of what I used to call my fort, but which my sister and parents referred to as the playhouse, I started freaking, I was suddenly and incredibly aware that I was out with Barbie. I didn't know what to say.

“So, what kind of a Barbie are you?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“Well, from listening to Jennifer I know there's Day to Night Barbie, Magic Moves Barbie, Gift-Giving Barbie, Tropical Barbie, My First Barbie, and more.”

“I'm Tropical,” she said. “I'm Tropical, she said, the same way a person might say I'm Catholic or I'm Jewish. “I came with a one-piece bathing suit, a brush, and a ruffle you can wear so many ways,” Barbie squeaked.

She actually squeaked. It turned out that squeaking was Barbie's birth defect. I pretended I didn't hear it.

We were quiet for a minute. A leaf larger than Barbie fell from the maple tree above us and I caught it just before it would have hit her. I half expected her to squeak, “You saved my life. I'm yours, forever.” Instead she said, in a perfectly normal voice. “Wow, big leaf.”

I looked at her. Barbie's eyes were sparkling blue like the ocean on a good day. I looked and in a moment noticed she had the whole world, the cosmos, drawn in makeup above and below her eyes. An entire galaxy, clouds, stars, a sun, the sea, painted onto her face. Yellow, blue, pink, and a million silver sparkles.

We sat looking at each other, looking and talking and then not talking and looking again. It was a stop-and-start thing with both of us constantly saying the wrong thing, saying anything, and then immediately regretting having said it.

It was obvious Barbie didn't trust me. I asked her if she wanted something to drink.

“Diet Coke,” she said. And I wondered why I'd asked.

I went into the house, upstairs into my parents' bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet, and got a couple of Valiums. I immediately swallowed one. I figured if I could be calm and collected, she'd realize I wasn't going to hurt her. I broke another Valium into a million small pieces, dropped some slivers into Barbie's Diet Coke, and swished it around so it'd blend. I figured if we could be calm and collected together, she'd be able to trust me even sooner. I was falling in love in a way that had nothing to do with love.

“So, what's the deal with you and Ken?” I asked later after we'd loosened up, after she'd drunk two Diet Cokes, and I'd made another trip to the medicine cabinet.

She giggled. “Oh, we're just really good friends.”

“What's the deal with him really, you can tell me, I mean, is he or isn't he?”

“Ish she or ishn' she,” Barbie said, in a slow slurred way, like she was so intoxicated that if they made a Breathalyzer for Valium, she'd melt it.

I regretted having fixed her a third Coke. I mean if she OD'd and died, Jennifer would tell my mom and dad for sure.

“Is he a faggot or what?”

Barbie laughed and I almost slapped her. She looked me straight in the eye.

“He lusts after me,” she said. “I come home at night and he's standing there, waiting. He doesn't wear underwear, you know. I mean, isn't that strange, Ken doesn't own any underwear. I heard Jennifer tell her friend that they don't even make any for him. Anyway, he's always there waiting, and I'm like, Ken, we're friends, okay, that's it. I mean, have you ever noticed, he has molded plastic hair. His head and his hair are all one piece. I can't go out with a guy like that. Besides, I don't think he'd be up for it if you know what I mean. Ken is not what you'd call well endowed…. All he's got is a little plastic bump, more of a hump, really, and what the hell are you supposed to do with that?”

She was telling me things I didn't think I should hear and all the same, I was leaning into her, like if I moved closer, she'd tell me more. I was taking every word and holding it for a minute, holding groups of words in my head like I didn't understand English. She went on and on, but I wasn't listening.

The sun sank behind the playhouse, Barbie shivered, excused herself, and ran around back to throw up. I asked her if she felt okay. She said she was fine, just a little tired, that maybe she was coming down with the flu or something. I gave her a piece of a piece of gum to chew and took her inside.

On the way back to Jennifer's room I did something Barbie almost didn't forgive me for. I did something which not only shattered the moment, but nearly wrecked the possibility of our having a future together.

In the hallway between the stairs and Jennifer's room, I popped Barbie's head into my mouth, like lion and tamer, God and Godzilla.

I popped her whole head into my mouth, and Barbie's hair separated into single strands like Christmas tinsel and caught in my throat nearly choking me. I could taste layer on layer of makeup, Revlon, Max Factor, and Maybelline. I closed my mouth around Barbie and could feel her breath in mine. I could hear her screams in my throat. Her teeth, white, Pearl Drops, Pepsodent, and the whole Osmond family, bit my tongue and the inside of my cheek like I might accidentally bite myself. I closed my mouth around her neck and held her suspended, her feet uselessly kicking the air in front of my face.

Before pulling her out, I pressed my teeth lightly into her neck, leaving marks Barbie described as scars of her assault, but which I imagined as a New Age necklace of love.

“I have never, ever in my life been treated with such utter disregard,” she said as soon as I let her out.

She was lying. I knew Jennifer sometimes did things with Barbie. I didn't mention that once I'd seen Barbie hanging from Jennifer's ceiling fan, spinning around in great wide circles, like some imitation Superman.

“I'm sorry if I scared you.”

“Scared me!” she squeaked.

She went on squeaking, a cross between the squeal when you let the air out of a balloon and a smoke alarm with weak batteries. While she was squeaking, the phrase
a head in the mouth is worth two in the bush
started running through my head. I knew it had come from somewhere, started as something else, but I couldn't get it right.
A head in the mouth is worth two in the bush,
again and again, like the punch line to some dirty joke.

“Scared me. Scared me. Scared me!” Barbie squeaked louder and louder until finally she had my attention again. “Have you ever been held captive in the dark cavern of someone's body?”

I shook my head. It sounded wonderful.

“Typical,” she said. “So incredibly, typically male.”

For a moment I was proud.

“Why do you have to do things you know you shouldn't, and worse, you do them with a light in your eye, like you're getting some weird pleasure that only another boy would understand. You're all the same,” she said. “You're all Jack Nicholson.”

I refused to put her back in Jennifer's room until she forgave me, until she understood that I'd done what I did with only the truest of feeling, no harm intended.

I heard Jennifer's feet clomping up the stairs. I was running out of time.

“You know I'm really interested in you,” I said to Barbie.

“Me too,” she said, and for a minute I wasn't sure if she meant she was interested in herself or me.

“We should do this again,” I said. She nodded.

I leaned down to kiss Barbie. I could have brought her to my lips, but somehow it felt wrong. I leaned down to kiss her and the first thing I got was her nose in my mouth. I felt like a St. Bernard saying hello.

No matter how graceful I tried to be, I was forever licking her face. It wasn't a question of putting my tongue in her ear or down her throat, it was simply literally trying not to suffocate her. I kissed Barbie with my back to Ken and then turned around and put her on the doily right next to him. I was tempted to drop her down on Ken, to mash her into him, but I managed to restrain myself.

“That was fun,” Barbie said. I heard Jennifer in the hall.

“Later,” I said.

Jennifer came into the room and looked at me.

“What?” I said.

“It's my room,” she said.

“There was a bee in it. I was killing it for you.”

“A bee. I'm allergic to bees. Mom, Mom,” she screamed. “There's a bee.”

“Mom's not home. I killed it.”

“But there might be another one.”

“So call me and I'll kill it.”

“But if it stings me, I might die.” I shrugged and walked out. I could feel Barbie watching me leave.

I
TOOK
a Valium about twenty minutes before I picked her up the next Friday. By the time I went into Jennifer's room, everything was getting easier.

“Hey,” I said when I got up to the dresser.

She was there on the doily with Ken, they were back to back, resting against each other, legs stretched out in front of them.

Ken didn't look at me. I didn't care.

“You ready to go?” I asked. Barbie nodded. “I thought you might be thirsty.” I handed her the Diet Coke I'd made for her.

I'd figured Barbie could take a little less than an eighth of a Valium without getting totally senile. Basically, I had to give her Valium crumbs since there was no way to cut one that small.

She took the Coke and drank it right in front of Ken. I kept waiting for him to give me one of those I-know-what-you're-up-to-and-I-don't-like-it looks, the kind my father gives me when he walks into my room without knocking and I automatically jump twenty feet in the air.

Ken acted like he didn't even know I was there. I hated him.

“I can't do a lot of walking this afternoon,” Barbie said. I nodded. I figured no big deal since mostly I seemed to be carrying her around anyway.

“My feet are killing me,” she said.

I was thinking about Ken.

“Don't you have other shoes?”

My family was very into shoes. No matter what seemed to be wrong, my father always suggested it could be cured by wearing a different pair of shoes. He believed that shoes, like tires, should be rotated.

“It's not the shoes,” she said. “It's my toes.”

“Did you drop something on them?” My Valium wasn't working. I was having trouble making small talk. I needed another one.

“Jennifer's been chewing on them.”

“What?”

“She chews on my toes.”

“You let her chew your footies?”

I couldn't make sense out of what she was saying. I was thinking about not being able to talk, needing another or maybe two more Valiums, yellow adult-strength Pez.

“Do you enjoy it?” I asked.

“She literally bites down on them, like I'm flank steak or something,” Barbie said. “I wish she'd just bite them off and have it over with. This is taking forever. She's chewing and chewing, more like gnawing at me.”

“I'll make her stop. I'll buy her some gum, some tobacco or something, a pencil to chew on.”

“Please don't say anything. I wouldn't have told you except…” Barbie said.