Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (12 page)

“This gravy is awesome,” says Eddie. That’s good news.
Awesome enough to sleep with me?
I want to ask, although people who have the haircut I have and wear the beige vest I wear don’t say such things. My haircut looks like the wigs men don when they want to pretend they are living in the era of Shakespeare. The bangs are totally harsh. I have wanted to tell cashiers,
Slit your wrists on my bangs, harlot!”
when they are rude to me, especially when they give me an amused look as I’m buying prophylactics. I know what they’re thinking: that I have no use for them.

But I do. I’ve even moved Baxter’s on-ramp away from the bed in preparation. He will not bite Eddie again. I might but Baxter won’t.

Except after dinner, Eddie stands and thanks me for a lovely evening, and says how much he’s really enjoying getting to know me. He will not accept drink or dessert. Turns out that Eddie does not imbibe alcohol. That’s okay with me I guess, all the better for his sexual performance. Finally, I come out with it.

“I’d like you to spend the night,” I say. “If you’re afraid the cat will be an issue, don’t worry. I’ve planned around him. He will not be crawling up on the bed and biting you during intercourse.” I feel like showing Eddie my breasts. I want to show them to someone so badly; even lifting up my shirt in front of a stranger who makes an awful face afterwards would be okay, would be better than this covered feeling that I have.

But Eddie itches his neck and says things are moving a little fast for him. He’d like to call it a night.
You’re a coward, Eddie
, I want to say, but instead I follow him to the door and wrap my arms around his back as he continues walking out until finally he’s moving so fast that I can’t keep up and have to let go.

I put on my pajamas and call a pizza delivery service and ask if they’ll please bring the pizza to me in my bed. Now that I know I probably won’t be having sex, I’m famished. I make up a story for the pizza man about being injured and bed-ridden, and the weary order-taker finally agrees to bring it inside and deliver it right to me.

When the pizza man comes, I flirt but he is not a bait-taker. I craftily lift up the sheets, acting shocked when my breasts ‘accidentally’ expose themselves. But he exits the room before I have a chance to find my wallet. I get the pizza free of charge.

There’s a pulling sound, quiet but slow, and I turn to see Baxter’s ramp moving back towards the bed. He is scooting it using his wide forehead. He stops once to vomit but then starts again. It is the most exercise I have ever seen him get. When he finally reaches the top of the bed, his mouth is a white sea of foam. He appears to be smiling; he lumbers to the outer crust of the pizza and we both eat until we are satisfied.

I am sixteen years old and I cannot have Luke Gunter’s baby. I have seen my older cousin’s deflated football breasts. They have weird marks and lines that make them seem like optical illusions, like how pencils placed into glasses of water appear broken.

Vaginal elasticity is a secondary concern. I do not want to suffer the fate of many a cute sweater, suddenly stretched too large for proper wear. My vag must stay like the glove in the infamous OJ Simpson trial: too small to fit unless the wearer really, really wants it to.

I have a lot on my mind even before Kristi removes her left shoe.

You’re missing half a toe?

Kristi is a risk-taker. She explains that one night she and her former boyfriend (his real name is something like Brian but he goes by Goober instead, or “The Goob”) each made a pact to cut off a piece. Kristi, of course, went first. Goober has a small machete collection thanks to the Citrus Park Flea Market, and after icing down her pinky toe she hooked it over a wooden stool. The real pain apparently came in the hours that followed. The actual moment of separation was only a pinch, like the guns they use to pierce your ears in the mall.

Goober chickened out, but that isn’t why she dumped him. “He started working at the gag-gift store next to Cookie Time. It was just too weird to hang out there. Every time I’d go in Goober and his co-workers were playing with a giant glow-in-the-dark body condom, all stoned and giggling. He seemed so seventh grade all of a sudden.”

We are painting our nails. Kristi’s bedspread is a cow skin rug that she’s very protective of; she keeps making little “tsk” noises at me when my foot gets too close to the edge of the towel.

“I beat you,” she says. With only 9 toenails Kristi has an unfair advantage. “It’s sort of why I never wear flip-flops. I mean I care what people think but I don’t.”

This is true. When Kristi was fourteen she got pregnant (pre-Goober) and paid Laura Fitch’s older brother Steve forty dollars to drive her to Orlando for an abortion. Rumor has it that Steve went to an arcade while it was being done and was problematically late in picking her back up.

I started hanging out with Kristi a few months later, when she got an iguana, but recently our friendship has taken an intimate and critical turn since I, too, am with-fetus. “Think of it as fat and you’re going to get lypo,” she says.

I’m not going to just stop in at the first clinic I pass; that’s what Kristi did and they vacuumed her. Maybe she was farther along. I don’t know the specifics. I want to go to The Blooming Rose.

Procedures at The Blooming Rose are naturally a bit more costly than those at clinics whose walls are cement blocks bearing STD posters. There’s one such poster at our school where each STD has an illustrated, anthropomorphized version of what that STD might look like, were it a grumpy cartoon character, drawn next to it.

The Rose has Georgia O’Keefe paintings.

Though if I put it on my credit card, my parents might get
involved
. As in possible hymen reconstruction surgery followed by an armored truck driving me to Barnard College post-graduation.

Too bad I didn’t get knocked up by Chet or another student with an American Express. I’m feeling the realized danger of sleeping with scholarship recipients like Luke, even though he’s totally hot and athletic, and he did get $500 for being a semi-finalist when I sent his photo into the
YM
secondary school Campus Crawl contest. But that money is gone. He bought me a purse.

When I get home, I decide the best thing to do is borrow Grandma’s credit card. She moved in with us after Grandpa died, five months before her tracheotomy. She was a model in her twenties, but she smoked like crazy and no part of her is beautiful anymore. I only smoke cigarettes occasionally at parties because I don’t want to end up sounding like an old robot.

“Gammy, can I see your wallet a second? In Driver’s Ed today they were talking about the different kinds of licenses, and how if you can’t drive, they just give you an ID card. I was thinking that must be what you have. You know how you can’t drive because of all the pills you take? How you hit that boy and they said no more wheels?” She sits up and tries unsuccessfully to straighten her wig. “It was funny when you called the arresting officer a pauper in court.”

She reaches for her microphone wand. It used to bother me a lot, especially since before the operation her voice was so soft and pretty. But now when she talks I just think of it as a sample in a rap song and it isn’t as weird. Kristi and I once told Gammy to say the word “homie” and she did. It was hilarious.

“M-y w-a-l-l-e-t? S-h-o-o-t. M-y p-u-r-s-e i-s a-r-o-u-n-d h-e-r-e s-o-m-e-w-h-e-r-e. D-a-m-n a-l-l t-h-e-s-e K-l-e-e-n-e-x w-a-d-s. Y-o-u-r m-a-i-d t-h-i-n-k-s s-h-e-s t-o-o g-o-o-d t-o p-i-c-k t-h-e-m u-p. T-e-l-l y-o-u-r f-a-t-h-e-r t-h-a-t.”

When I see her purse, I find the card and write down its numbers. She’s doing something to her lap dog that seems like a tumor-search, carefully rubbing little spots on his stomach.

“Thanks, Gammy. That’s interesting. Your hair looks good in that picture.”

“C-a-n y-o-u c-h-a-n-g-e m-y s-o-c-k-s? T-h-e-y a-r-e w-e-t a-g-a-i-n.”

She always thinks her socks are wet. I go over and pretend I’m feeling them without actually touching her feet.

Tonight Luke and I are watching television and doing a position called “reverse jackhammer.” We saw it in a magazine.

“I can really feel the blood rushing to my head!” I say. In the mirror I watch Luke’s testicles bounce to and fro like a rubber cat toy. I want to reach out and bat at them playfully, except then I’d land on my skull.

When Luke’s finished he always sucks in a mass of air like he just got the world’s biggest paper cut. It sounds painful. The moment he relaxes, I push off his body and land back on all fours.

“That was excellent,” he says. “Since we got together, I don’t think I’ve been on the Internet.”

I nod, bringing his head to my chest like he’s a giant infant. He tells me all about the upcoming football game this Friday and his tactics as quarterback, who he thinks is ready and who isn’t. I completely drown out the actual meaning of his words and just listen to the sound, the depth of it, like his voice is one of those CDs of whale calls they sell in the nature store.

Later I change into a sundress and go with Luke to get vitamin supplements. He’s way too concerned about his body to drink or do drugs, but he doesn’t seem to care that I do. I’m a little paranoid about this. In my worst nightmares, Luke is disqualified from a critical game because he got a contact high from my vaginal secretions and failed a pee-test.

“You have got to tell him. You really have to.”

Kristi and I are watching a home video of her performing fellatio on Chet. She has this idea to make instructional tapes and sell them to the younger girls at school. We’re trying to write notes for the voice-over narration.

“Does he do something to his pubes or are they just like that?” I can’t decide whether or not Chet is attractive in the throws of pleasure. His upper lip peels back from the gum line in an equine fashion. It’s all very Mister Ed.

“Dunno. Maybe henna. What is so hard about telling him?”

“But I’m taking care of it.” Every thirty seconds or so in the video, Kristi looks back at the camera like she’s worried things aren’t being recorded properly.

“Hey, was this on a tripod? Who taped this?”

“Levi. Look, you just should tell him. Why go through all this alone? Plus it’s way weird if he finds out afterwards. Awkward.”

“Levi? Your brother Levi?”

“What. I gave him ten bucks.”

“Oh, gross.”

I watch Chet’s hands grip her head with a numb type of violence, like she’s electrocuting him but he can’t let go. Kristi has taped nearly every sexual deed from the past year and a half. Anything involving communal acts with myself or another girl has the base title of “Sister Act” followed by a roman numeral.

Kristi sighs. “Luke’s body is so athletic. I wish Chet looked like that.”

This comment makes my stomach feel bad, like I’ve eaten too much. “Luke’s
my
boyfriend,” I want to say.

Instead I excuse myself and go throw up. I guess it’s morning sickness.

When I meet with the on-site counselor at “The Blooming Rose,” I’m given a clipboard and a pencil with an acronym on its side: Abstinence Is Definitely Safe.

“AIDS,” I say out loud. Everyone in the waiting room looks up overtop their magazines at me.

I’m led to a tiny office where another woman enters and takes my questionnaire. She doesn’t tell me her name but it’s definitely something unisex. She is sow-ish and baggy. Her eyes shoot me a look that says, “I’d love to be your friend if I didn’t feel so sorry for you and you weren’t so irresponsible.”

“I’m here to tell you about all your choices,” she smiles.

I nod but really I’m picturing the post-delivery butt of my cousin. She had just one kid and now her whole backside looks like a Salvador Dali painting.

“Have you thought about having the baby and putting it up for adoption?”

I begin to take on a false, considerate persona but stop before I even begin. I’m going to have to break her heart sometime, and it might as well be sooner.

“Isn’t that like buying the cow and not even getting the milk?”

She starts writing furiously behind a manila folder. When she finally stops, she gives me a look of unfettered hate.

“Are you saying the baby is the cow? Or the baby is the milk.”

I lean forward a little in my chair. I want whatever is inside of me to hear my words and be crystal clear about the fact that it will not be staying long. I plan on throwing it a large goodbye party attended only by myself and lots of champagne.

“I don’t want this thing. There’s really no point in talking about it.”

She takes off her glasses and I realize that her eyes are two different colors. I can’t decide if it’s natural or if a contact fell out. If she were cooler it would make me think of David Bowie, but instead it just splits her personality further into Good Cop/Bad Cop. I focus on the eye I decide represents her more sympathetic half.

“Young lady, I’m going to tell you something and you can believe it or disbelieve it. But later on down the road, and it may be months or even years, you might really have a problem with the decision you made.”

“Okay?”

Obviously, there is a certain level of warmth or tragedy that she’s used to getting from these meetings, and she doesn’t feel like ours is complete enough to let me leave.

“I know that at your age, it’s hard to understand the concept of something being permanent. But later on you may feel...an emptiness.”

“Having a baby is just as permanent as not having a baby.”

“But it’s different,” she says. “You can’t see that?”

And then I start crying in order to please the sow. To get it over and be done with it. “I just need to do this,” I say. I keep repeating it until she comes over and hugs me, until her sandbag breasts are covered in my tears.

Kristi sent a balloon arrangement to my room in the clinic. One says, “You’re a Star!” and is actually shaped like a star. Another, “Congratulations.” My parents think we’re having a sleep over.

The doctors here are all male and seem to regard me as a liability, like at any moment I’m going to come on to them in a provocative underage way. They always leave a door open and call a female nurse before touching me.