S: Like the day when we were talking about lying and Mrs. Rhys asked if it’s ever good to tell a lie, and I said—
A: “My house is wallpapered with lies.” Everyone looked away, except for my friends. You can’t see someone like my dad without realizing how easily people are taken in.
(Pause)
Z: I’m thinking maybe I’m going to try to be a better person and not outburst so much.
S: My mom says I need to get better ways of thinking. What I like is reading and singing, because I can just sort of get lost in them and not have to think about things.
A: But when I want to think about something, I sit here on my bed, because in my room, I can concentrate.
S: If she wants to know, she can come in here.
A: But she’s not coming.
S: So maybe she doesn’t want to know.
Z: Me? I’m never going to forget what it’s like here. How bad it is. When I’m older, I’ll probably think—
S: It wasn’t so bad.
A: But I’ll know it’s a lie.
(Lights out)
Maurice
Kathy Najimy
Junior high is God’s little joke on teenagers. Especially a ME teenager: fat, frizzy-haired and the money my dad made on two jobs—butcher and postal sorter (with the help of welfare powdered potatoes) didn’t allow for the mandatory hip junior high clothes. Although I had big thighs and hair like frayed wire, I did have a great personality … and when I turned sixteen, I discovered my BOOBS.
So did Maurice. Maurice … drove a dry cleaners van that belonged to his uncle that you can still spot cruising around San Diego to this day.
I knew somewhere inside that he didn’t deserve me or the person I was soon to discover I was.
My best friend was Lavonne. Lavonne was beautiful but because she had a strict mom—and I was a “good girl,” her mom would only let her hang around and go out with me. Lavonne had green eyes and long brown hair, and although she was white, it wasn’t until years later that I realized Lavonne’s mom named her a black girl’s name. Lavonne liked me because I was fun and funnnny. We did prank phone calls till we choked from laughter … some fun, some really mean. We jumped into strange guys’ cars on a dare, we shoplifted See’s candy. We had a blast.
Lavonne and I were in the tenth grade, but because she was dating Doug (who looked like James Taylor and was older than us), one night we got invited to a party with the juniors and seniors. I ironed the shit out of my steel-wool hair and grabbed my Cost Less Imports Indian-print halter dress. Yep, my boobs were finally here, and I was gonna present them to the twelfth-grade boys! The party was at somebody’s divorced mom’s ugly San Diego apartment complex. We walked in (well, my boobs walked in first) chugging out of our Boone’s Farm and Annie Green Springs bottles of cheap sugar wine.
It was smoky and loud. Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral” blared. Lavonne found Doug and after a flirty batting and lowering of her repressed-girl eyes … they were off making out on the orange beanbag chair. Maurice De Mayo (I do not make this name up) started walking in my direction. Maurice was a popular SENIOR. He was most known for two things—his huge Jew-fro and the fact that he drove around in his uncle’s dry-cleaning van with DE MAYO DRY CLEANERS proudly printed on both sides. If you could see past the fro, he was kind of cute. He had large French-like features and a sexy smile. As he walked, I saw him scanning the room. Most of the cute senior and junior girls were already coupled up with guys, making out, dancing, or puking. Me and my D’s were standing in the doorway; I was forcing down the wine I pretended to actually like. I guess he figured this fat tenth grader with questionable hair might be an option. He strutted up to me and my rack. I seriously could not believe it. This is the guy who dated Maxi—the stoner-cute, almost phantomlike cool girl that was WAY out of my league. Maurice and I talked for a minute. It was almost hilarious—he did that thing where he started to talk, looking in my eyes, and then finished his sentence staring at my boobs. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“In the VAN?” I said.
“Yep.”
We got in despite the fact that I had to do an embarrassing hike up with both hands to get my short legs into the seat. I masked it with a high-pitched “WOW, this is cool” to cover the grunt that helped haul my ass into the car.
He pushed in an eight-track of Three Dog Night—“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever doooooo”—and we started driving and talking. I thought, Wow, he is actually talking and listening to me. Then we pulled into a driveway that led to the empty parking lot of the Kmart on El Cajon Boulevard. He had his hand on my thigh tapping out the rhythm of the song. He turned off the engine and lunged in to kiss me. I could not believe we were making out! He was smashing my mouth and jabbing his tongue in. It was weird but all I could think about was getting back to that party and telling Lavonne, “I made out with Maurice De Mayo!” He kept wet-kissing when he lifted his whole body and put it right on top of mine. He was hugging and pushing on me and groping at my breasts, which were now way free of the halter. He felt sweaty and hot and smelled like Brass Monkey. I kind of enjoyed the kissing and the boob stuff, but now his whole body was on top of mine … hard. I was squashed in the passenger seat—I couldn’t even kiss anymore. I tried to find an empty airspace to breath. He was heavy, humping on me, and then started to lift my dress up. Then it all came to me in a flash. This was it. This was it. I was going to lose my virginity in a cleaner’s van in the parking lot of Kmart to a guy whose hair was bigger than his head and who probably didn’t even know my name. “Um. Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to do this.… Stop.”
“No,” he said.
“Stop,” I said.
“IT’S TOO LATE!” he screamed at me. I will never forget that phrase. “IT’S TOO LATE!!” (I didn’t know … was I unaware? Did boys have some physical limit that made it impossible for them to stop? Was I going to break something in his insides?… A muscle that, once they started humping and kissing on a slutty fat girl, they couldn’t possibly stop without being paralyzed??!) “It’s too late!” He shoved his Levi’ed crotch on top of my underwear. “No!” I said, and in a moment of brilliant clarity, I reached over and grabbed the handle on my side of the van door. Maurice just dropped … fell out and smashed onto the cement parking lot floor and rolled. He didn’t say a word to me the whole ride back to drop me off at the party. I reached for the van door handle … my savior … and got out. I went in, got Lavonne, a Tab and a bag of barbecue Lay’s potato chips, and walked home.
(Hey, Did You Happen to See)
The Most Beautiful Girl in the World
Jyllian Gunther
It wasn’t until Goldsmith Amazan punched me in the guts that I noticed his man-ness. Not until he had me backed into the corner and I had my arms blocking my chest while he laid into me did I smell him, did I see his shape, did I feel the possibility of his interest in me. We locked eyes. And it was an awkward moment because while I was laughing in the girlish way we often succumb to when it’s more convenient to be treated like less than an equal, Goldsmith Amazan wanted me to forget my sex and defend myself so he could punch me harder. But suddenly, sex was all I could think of, and also, what would it be like to get naked with Goldsmith Amazan. He must’ve sensed this, because within moments I sensed the same thought grazing his mind about me. Before that, Goldsmith Amazan was just fifty dollars an hour packed in an unobserved male body that humored me by putting me in twelve-ounce gloves and training me for something where the actual applied benefit was to make my ass look good. He said he wanted me to lose seven pounds. “You’re not fat,” he assuaged me, “but if you lose seven pounds, you’ll be better, trust me.”
Say I’m not a genius, call me stupid or childish or lazy—all of those things roll off me because either they aren’t true, or better, if they are, somehow I don’t care if you think so. But if you’re looking for my heel, the place to shoot the arrow, just tell me I’m not attractive. Tell me I’m not graceful,
I’m unfeminine, discount my girl-ness, and I’m likely down for the count.
I remember, as early as junior high school, being accosted with perverted comments from construction workers on the way to school. But the days when they said nothing were worse. I got paranoid and checked my reflection in store windows. What was wrong with me when they didn’t catcall? They whistled even at gimps. How did a mere walk to the subway qualify as a runway competition? Why am I losing out to the crippled? And where did this derogatory tone come from??
Why do women pit themselves against one another? It’s a fine line between admiration and envy. My stomach turns when I watch women scan the pages of fashion magazines, something I willfully rarely do. How their eyes dart about, taking in each detail with a yearning fused with incredible discrimination. For one, I don’t want that kind of futile information in my head, but more than that, I’ll admit, I don’t know how to process that kind of information in any other way but to feel that somewhere inside me, I want to look like a cover girl. The dichotomy is mildly crippling.
An Italian cover girl. That’s what my stepmother looked like. At twenty-five, she was barely old enough to have a daughter of eight, nor did she want one. She showed up the same year that my mother died, and I was grateful for anyone to replace her. But she made it clear she was not interested, at least not in an oaf like me. Suddenly I was an oaf? It doesn’t look like that in old photos, but it’s clear from my expressions in those photos that I felt like one. Especially around her, and especially when she told me so. And when I was with her, it always seemed that the world agreed.
It was a hot New York July day, the kind on which disco sweated out of open sedan windows and hung in the air like a fragrance. Add a tinge of garbage soaked in hydrant water sizzling on the pavement, tube tops, Corkys, and men in wife-beaters tippin’ 40s. Summer in the seventies was dirty and sexy. You didn’t have to know what sex was to know what it felt like. I walked with my stepmother through the streets and watched men’s heads turn as if she were walking topless with whipped cream on her nipples, and I felt like a ghost. The same way I used to feel when I was in the room with her and my father. The way she looked at him, the way he looked at her in response with longing. She made him want her, and she made sure he knew he’d have to earn it. How she was able to tell him in a look that if he didn’t give her what she wanted, he got nothing. I wanted that power.
When we got to the corner, we stopped in front of a bodega and she went for the door, but the owner, a middle-aged Dominican man, had seen her coming and had already opened it for her. As she stepped inside, he started to sing along with the AM radio hit blaring in the background, as though it were perfectly timed for her entrance: “Hey, did you happen to see the most beautiful girl in the world?” She soaked it up, anybody would, it was nothing but complimentary, and I watched from the street, sure that this would never happen to me because I would never be an Italian cover girl. As if that was the highest attainable goal I could have.
Later that evening, as she was crossing the street a few feet ahead of my father and me, a bum came up out of nowhere and kicked her in the ass, then stumbled away laughing. She wanted my father to do something. I don’t remember if he did, but I do remember it made me feel good, her getting kicked in her fine ass like that. So it begins.
Goldsmith Amazan has got me in the corner again, only this time, instead of punching me, he hugs me the way the fighters do when they’re exhausted. Of course, this intimate embrace seems ironic because you know the fighters will pummel each other in the next moment. But Goldsmith Amazan’s not planning to pummel me, and I don’t think he needs a rest, he just wants, well, to feel me. Because he is feeling me. And it feels good. And I let myself enjoy it for those split seconds. In times like these, when a man overtly shows his attraction to me, let me admit with a modicum of shame and disappointment that part of me wishes my stepmother were there to witness it. With further self-judgment, bordering on disgust, I admit that I want her there also because I know that, former cover girl or no, she is now pushing fifty-five and her magic is half the strength of mine, me, still in my thirties. (And plus I’ve seen a photo and she just flat out “didn’t age that well”—a concept I seem to subscribe to, despite the fact that I disagree with its guidelines, or rather, more wish I did.)
But she’s not here, and that’s not why I’m here, so I take advantage of Goldsmith Amazan’s moment of repose to catch him off guard. In one move, I shove him off me and land a left hook to his jaw. I can feel the reverb as his head pops back, and for a moment he is disoriented. But it’s a short moment, and he hits me back with a smile of approval that overlaps my girl-o-matic “Sorry!” followed by his “Don’t be. That’s what you were trying to do, wasn’t it?”
It is in this moment I realize that hitting someone just might feel worse than being hit, that while it’s been in me for years to throw a punch, landing one is not what I really want.
Conversations with My Son
Susan Miller
On the same day, in the same newspaper, this is what I read: “In war-torn Africa, young girls are very very old.” Three pages later: “A village grows rich off its main export: its daughters.” I rip out the articles to put in a folder thick with these clippings. A woman in India goes to the police to report a gang rape, and she is raped by the police. A Pakistani woman is punished for crimes her brother committed. UN peacekeepers in the Congo lure twelve-year-old girls with cookies and do to them what is always done to them.
I call my son. “What does this mean? You’re a man. Is this something you understand?”
“Mom—”
There’s a certain way he says “Mom” that means whatever I want to talk about, he doesn’t.
“Chill. Not now, okay? I’m going into a meeting. I’m pulling onto the Disney lot as we speak. Wait, I’ll ask the guard at the gate what he thinks. Yeah. He says he’s not getting into it with me again.”
“Fine.”
My son has been part of this sorrowful, tortured inquiry into the nature of humanity since he was old enough to ask why it was always the women who had to take their clothes off in movies.
“Look, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m sorry this is in the world.”
“Call me after the pitch. What’s it about?”
“A mother and son’s tortured inquiry into the sorry nature of humanity. Which I’m hoping Disney thinks is about a girl who turns into a skyscraper.”
“Well, if anyone can do it—”
“Remember the mantra, Mom.” He names women who have changed history. He rattles off female heads of state. And I shoot back with baseball players and their stats.
“They’ll probably make me turn the girl into a boy.”
“Don’t let them.”
I wish him luck and go on with my day. So many people seeking asylum, while I seek penance for my privilege. In the house where I grew up there was a light at the end of the hall—secure passage. I thought this was everywhere. I believed this to be like everyone’s house. And so I install a light at the end of the hall where I live with my growing son.
He’s seventeen. He’s just gotten off the phone with a girl.
“Abby’s going out with a jerk.”
“A jerk in what way?”
“A jerk in the way he treats her.”
“She shouldn’t stay with him, then.”
“That’s what I told her.”
“Is he hurting her?”
“Not physically. But a man acting rotten—that’s not being a man.”
Emily, Alison, Shoshana—these are not names in my son’s little black book. These are the young women who call him, who he meets for coffee, who come to our house for Scrabble, who seek his counsel, who counsel him. These are his friends. In their company he becomes a man and what a man should be.
But there was a period of time when he did not want to look at girls or women in the context of their historical plight. He didn’t care to hear my opinions on the subject, either.
So I mostly kept quiet when he and his friends ogled the opposite sex, which had really become for them, suddenly, a sex so opposite their own that they had no choice but to study and learn it, to fall under its sway, to map it. This was, after all, a rite of passage. And I didn’t want to deprive him of it. All I could do was hope he’d emerge someday from this hormonal stupor and once again recognize the opposite sex as human people from planet Earth.
He’s thirty. I call him out of a deep sleep. “What is this date-rape drug? Why would a human do this to another human?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
“What if you have a daughter someday?”
“Please. Why do you do this to me? I’m going back to sleep.”
We hang up. He calls me back.
“I’d have her followed. I’d have her phone tapped. I’d hire someone to watch over her.”
Our conversation spills over to the next day.
“Just—crimes against women are different,” he says. “I mean, you don’t worry about your son getting date-raped. Maybe you worry about your son raping his date. Jesus. Has the world eaten up and sucked the soul out of more people, or do I just know more about it? I think men feel inferior in a lot of ways to do these things. And women pay the price. It goes way back. You know you can physically dominate, but there’s an unwritten law that a man should never put his hands on a woman or child. ‘Women and children first’ is there for a reason. They’re more important.”
I’m walking. I’m walking to figure out what I’m thinking. My cell rings. “What’s up with this American servicewoman putting an Iraqi prisoner on a leash?”
“But who do you think gave the orders? Who put us there in the first place?”
“Still. Mom. Still.”
I miss him. I miss his face. So I fly out to visit him in L.A. We’re sitting with our coffee in the morning sun, watching people buy fruit and flowers at the farmers’ market. While, somewhere else, it’s been another day of violence.