Gringa (7 page)

“You're sure a sweet little thang,” Farin said in a guttural voice. I was sweating heavily. Farin pushed me back against the door and put his mouth over my nipple. He sucked. I felt like a fool. I knew his hand was along a road he knew well and I was about to learn, I wanted it to be there, but I didn't think it ought to be so dumb, so easy. I had heard all about basketball from Farin, last season and this. I knew how much his new seat covers had cost him, and that he planned to go to Tech and study business, maybe even accounting if he could do the work. This didn't seem like a fair trade for my virginity, even if my virginity was something I was ready to be rid of. I squeezed my legs and twisted hard. His hand was caught between my thighs. I released it as I pushed it out from under my skirt.

“Listen!” I cried, my decision made. He seemed to be holding his breath. “I am NOT going to do it!” Farin rallied and sat up again.

“You tellin me—” he started to say. Both hands went down to his crotch, making a little shield over what he had there. “Shit!” he said. “You some goddamned virgin?” Then he said something that sounded like “Nuuuuh!” I was more embarrassed than anything. Weakly, I said I was. Soft, sweet as a chirping bird, he called me over. He hunched over his jeans, undoing them. “Just put your hand on it,” he said. I must have looked amazed. “On the outside, then, baby,” he said. He put my hand where he wanted it. He was hot and damp and swollen under the shorts. Size thirty, I thought. He groaned again: “Nuuuh!” He grabbed my bra and stuffed it down inside his shorts under our hands. He made his noise one more time and then fell quiet. Gently, I slid my hand away and put my blouse on again without the purloined bra. He wiped his forehead with his left hand, and pulled the bra out with his right and handed it to me. “Put it in your purse, honey,” he murmured. He got out of the car and pissed right by the door. I watched him shake himself dry.

When he got back in he patted me on the arm and said, “S'aright.” He started the car and gunned the motor a couple of times. “I guess I figgered wrong,” he said. “You looked to me like—” He turned the car off again. “Damn it, you looked like a girl who'd like it. Do you?” At least he hadn't said, a girl who'd do it. I didn't have an answer. He leaned over and slid a hand up under my skirt very fast. I twisted away a bit and he snapped, “Be still!” I complied. His hand went straight up my legs like a snake until it bumped against my underwear. Briskly, he worked his hand beneath the nylon and thrust a finger inside me. I jumped, astonished, but he held on, not doing anything with his finger, simply being there, a stationary object. I felt myself pulsing, closing wet and slick around his finger, I felt the finger drawing from me, sucking me into his flesh. As abruptly as he had intruded, he pulled out. He made a big show of wiping his finger on his pants. “I thought maybe you were just teasing me,” he said. “Playing games with ole Farin. But shit, you want it and don't know what it is! You got my timing all off, I had you figgered wrong. Then it was too late to slack off and go slow. But you ain't lying. If you knew what it felt like, you wouldn't be able to say no.” He adjusted his Levis around his crotch. “You got a sticky cunt,” he grinned. He burned rubber pulling away. In front of my house, he leaned across me and opened the door on my side. “See you around,” he said. As I got out, he slapped at my buttocks. “When you're ready!” he laughed.

After that I knew what to expect, and I knew I wasn't, in Farin's terms, “ready.” I went out because I was lonely and because I would take what there was, but I wasn't going to lie down for some ducktailed conceited dumb boy who asked me out because he couldn't think of any other girl. They rolled up the sleeves of their tee-shirts, these boys; they belched their beer and couldn't think of anything at all to ask me about myself. My dates were a joke, slow and boring, but I couldn't say, “Skip the movie, let's go park.” They would never have believed me when I drew the line. Once we were in the dark, and I closed my eyes, I forgot who the boy was, and it was hard to stop in time. I loved the sly journey up my leg, a boy's hand moving so slow. I longed for the finger inside me, the spasms it brought on. I remembered Natalie at twelve, with Kermit, and I struck her bargain with these boys: I would touch them and they could touch me. As for the rest of it, I said, “My brother would kill me.” Kermit was no big slugger, but he was older, out of school, and it called on some sort of respect when I said that. “Sure, whatever you say,” they said. There were three, then four of them, coming back every two or three weeks, seldom overlapping their calls. I thought maybe they got together and made a calendar for me, but this was so terrible a thing to consider I told myself I was being silly.

One of the boys told me I was giving him blue balls, he was going to die. I said I'd made it clear from the beginning, he knew what was coming and what was not. When he didn't push me any further, slumping down in the seat in a pitiable pose, I remembered what Farin had done, and I offered a little more, just that one time, for that one boy, but I was kidding myself.

The others began to ache and complain, saying they didn't have that much self-control, they were horny for sweet chrissake; they made it sound like I was so pretty and sexy, they fell down a dark deep sweet hole and couldn't climb out, and I let myself believe it. I let them lie, and I bought the lie, and it was me who slid down.

There had been Farin, and then there had been Larry, so what was it to lay a cool hand over Karlie, and then Maynard? They gave something in return, whether they meant to think of me or not. They wriggled faraway extensions of themselves inside me; I learned to put my hand on a wrist to quiet it, and to make the feelings happen myself, in my own rhythm. I learned to take pleasure from these shabby hours on the edge of town. And when I saw my dates in the halls at school, they grinned at me, the way Kermit had grinned that time in the car, telling me about Natty. And those grins—there was nothing hateful in them, nothing terribly smug. They said: Don't we know it's fun? They were all so gawky and young! They had big Adam's apples and their ugly hair. And none of the “neat” girls—the ones in expensive dresses, with hair done at beauty parlors and pulled up in tortoise shell barettes—would have anything to do with them in a hundred years. Sometimes, for just a moment, I felt those boys tug at my heart; weren't we all in the same sinking boat? Sometimes now, looking back, I think: I should have let them all. I should have lain in the back seats of a dozen cars and made them feel important, because in the end, don't I know they had little dreams and lost even them? Don't I know I wasn't any better?

IN THE SUMMER I WORKED as often as they needed me, relieving clerks on vacation. My mother asked me, “What are you going to do with all that money, Abilene?” I'd bought a few clothes, and my bicycle. The rest was in a savings account. As soon as she asked me, though, I knew the answer was that I was saving to go away—from her, from West Texas, from all the Thursday nights at J.C. Penney's, the cycle of dates and necking and the lack of hope. My mother saw it on my face; she never spoke to me again of my money, never once asked me what I was going to do after high school. She hardly spoke to me at all. The hard part was going to be getting through another year.

Then one hot summer afternoon Natty came by my house looking for someone to “round out” a car full of boys. She was with Chip somebody, and Hoot Gibson, whose real name was Andrew, and Charlie Jamison, all of them out of school now, hot shot graduates. Hoot held up a six-pack and said, “Cold suds for a hot day,” and somebody said, “Hell, two girls will do, let's get the show on the road.” Natty sat in the front between Charlie and Hoot, while I sat in the back with Chip. He was as quiet as I was. Besides, we couldn't have gotten in a word over the other three.

We went to a place in the sandhills that Charlie knew. That Natty probably knew. That I'd thought about a hundred times. I knew that sooner or later a lot of kids went to the sandhills, white and pale and yellow and gritty and hot in the sun, with sand that ground itself into your pores, into your ears and nose and mouth, that found its way into your private parts and made your hair heavy, sand that was soft to lie on. I'd never been there, but I'd dreamed about the sand, a Texas Sahara, to be lost in, to lie down in and say no, please don't, not meaning it, and later stop stop, when it was too late. Nobody had ever asked me to go to the sand, because nobody had ever asked me out in the daylight. But I knew the questions girls asked themselves out there: If I let him will he love me? and If I let him will he think I'm awful after? I'd thought about how it would feel, white and twitching on the sand. I'd thought: What if it hurts? and then, So what, it's only the first time it hurts. There were bargains made in the sand, and babies, and sometimes trouble. Not rich girls. Boys knew their fathers would be waiting up when the girls got home, knew that if you made a rich girl pregnant you didn't have to get married, you could go to jail. But there were lots of girls who didn't have fathers who cared. (I knew this, but I didn't know any of those girls. I didn't have any friends at all. What would I have done? Gone up to a girl and said, you're no better off than me, let's be friends?)

I knew Natty knew the tricks. I knew she made boys glad to be with her. Kermit had told me a story, not so much to amuse me as warn me. (“You better not get yourself in trouble!”) He said, she gives head. Once some boys had given her a package of banana popsicles, and she'd laughed like crazy and passed them around to everybody standing near. And I knew something they were too dumb to see, even Kermit: she was using them to practice for the real world, when she would get out of here.

The sun was glaring. We walked over the hills, carrying an ice chest and blankets and a portable radio. (“Come along and be my party doll!”) We stumbled, our bare feet sinking in the sand; our breath was coming hard.

“Jesus Piss it's hot,” Natty said, and the boys laughed. “We gotta be crazy coming to the goddamned sandhills in the middle of the goddamned day in the middle of the goddamned summer!” she shouted. “Like it is fucking HOT!” and at that the boys screamed with laughter, looking at her and at each other. I straggled behind with Chip, carrying the blankets.

Someone said, “Hey, how about this tree!” (more hysterical laughter), and just like that, we plopped down and began to drink beer. I drank mine too fast and it made me belch, and when I looked around to see who'd heard me, everybody started laughing, and I laughed too. I stretched out and put my head in Chip's lap. Natalie lay on a blanket between Hoot and Charlie. They told dirty jokes and sang with the radio (“My little ruuuunaway!”) and kept popping open beers. Charlie said something that made Natty pretend she was mad, and they wrestled and brawled and ended in a hot sandy embrace, the length of them, right in front of all the rest of us. She pulled away and stood up. “Christ, I am H-O-T!” she said. We all said, “Amen,” like in a church.

“You know what let's do?” she said. “Let's take off all our clothes.” Nobody said anything. In a minute or two Charlie got up and took his jeans and shirt off, standing in his jockey shorts. “Oh no, macho,” Natty said. “Aaaall clothes!” she growled, leaping across Hoot and pulling Charlie's shorts down around his ankles. “Off off off!” she cried, and in a flash she was naked, and then Hoot. The three of them began to dance around like Indians in a cowboy movie, their hands back and forth against their mouths, dancing around Chip and me, still lying on the blanket. “No fair! No fair!” Natty poked at us, and Charlie and Hoot joined in. They shouted, “No fair!” a dozen times or more, and then they stopped, still, spaced around the two of us on the ground.

“Come on, Abby, take it off,” Natalie said in a soft sweet voice. The beer and the sun had made me dizzy. I saw Charlie and Hoot standing with their hands on their hips, their faces wet with sweat, their penises hanging crazily in the sun. I thought how much it would hurt to have a sunburned penis. “Off,” Natty said, quite firmly.

“Come on, Natty, please,” I said. I looked at Chip. “You won't let them make me, will you?” I asked.

“Just hold on,” Chip said, but his voice was a boy's voice, with no authority. It made the others grin. What was he going to do about it? I felt something knocking inside me, I couldn't tell where the thumping was, I knew it had to be fear, and I thought: I can't die of this. Then, simply, as if it had been rehearsed many times, Natty and Hoot and Charlie were a tableau in motion. Without frenzy, they moved in on us. Charlie and Hoot knelt beside Chip and put a hand, each of them, on his shoulder. Chip as good as disappeared before our eyes. He lifted his hand off of me, and moved away. Natty, making deep noises like cat's purrs in the back of her voice, noises like a lover crooning, knelt in front of me. I couldn't make a sound; my head went slowly back and forth, pleading. Natty moved carefully, the soft noises from her throat rising like froth, her tongue clicking faintly. She put her hands on me just above the knees, and I knew, as if it had been announced from a sky split open for this purpose, that there was nothing I would do to stop her. That, whatever she wanted, I would do. Our little scene had become a ritual. It was no longer a game; it was a force that made a new space in my world. I forgot about the naked boys, the male eyes fastened on me in horrified elation. Natty ran her hands in soothing strokes down the lengths of my legs, again and again, slowly, strength and tenderness mixed, and then she began to stroke harder, kneading my flesh. I remembered how she had touched me, on the floor of her tacky bathroom in Hadicol Camp, and I began to whine. Natty shushed me like a whining baby. “Don't be afraid,” she said. “I love you, sweetie. Don't you know I can make you feel good?”