Slut Lullabies (23 page)

“Does this mean you don't want to go to Melkweg?” Roos asked, and for a moment his heart soared—maybe she would say never mind, maybe she would stay with him for as long as they had left. But when he hesitated, he saw only that she hoped for a way out of this drama—that he would stomp off now and make it easy, or come and play along, admit she was right the way he usually did, chalk it up to his unworldly American-ness. Her wrist, resting on her knees, had returned to the living, breathing color of the rest of her skin—his flash of violence now invisible. He had the urge to grab her again, to mark her, to keep her from slipping away. His hand stayed still.

“Not everything can work out,” he said quietly, as bodies around them filed past, heading home or toward other scenes of merriment, the parade done. “Sometimes you have to take a risk and get hurt for anything to be worth it or real.” He realized he knew this, too, from his mother—the hopeful and brave parts of his psyche as sure as the parts of which he was ashamed—while Roos' mother would never run across an ocean for love or disappear into the bones of her own body in the grief of its disillusionment. Right now Roos' mother was probably smoking and serene, lost in the abstract pictures of her head alone on the houseboat, a model to her daughter of how to live a perfectly self-possessed, independent life free of pain. Did it work? Could you close yourself off that way, even with the best plan? He'd thought he could, but his mother's blood ran through him, impulsive and naive and full of some blind capacity for love he had never known he possessed—and that Roos would not give him the chance to explore and see if it was real.

“I think I'll take a pass,” he said, and touched her wrist once more, gently this time. “I'll call you before I leave, though.”

She stood to fold her chair, held it without difficulty under one arm. Her blinking eyes at a rare appearance of sun seemed doll-like, confused, slightly dazed as to how meaning had proven so slippery between them. Then when he stood stupidly failing to lift his own chair, Roos hoisted that too and headed over the bridge toward Lisle's empty home.

The last time I saw my dad beating Crystal she was two months pregnant. She had just found out, after having spent the past few weeks puking every morning at 5:00 AM. She wasn't showing yet. Still, when I saw my dad kicking her while she slumped there on the floor, I kept imagining I saw a baby in her stomach, like one of the seals through a glass window at Sea World or something, swimming in water and staring out at the random observers who came by to watch it. Crystal was lying there crying, her arms around her head. I wanted to yell from the stairs and tell her to cover her stomach, but I didn't dare. I stayed quiet, waiting until he'd left her gasping and choking next to the couch. She rolled onto her back. She looked like she was trying to breathe. The baby stared at me from inside the glass cell of her stomach, its eyes as blank and inscrutable as a fish. It was saying, Help me. Get me out of here.

The next morning no one wanted to get out of bed. My dad had been drinking again, down in the kitchen until two or three in the morning, popping the tops off beer cans at a rate of about one every twenty minutes. Crystal also slept late, or pretended to. I didn't want to be the first one up, but I was starving. I went downstairs in my robe and two pairs of socks. Our furnace had been broken since January, and despite reports on the local news of New Hampshire residents freezing to death, Dad hadn't yet put aside money to have it fixed. Crystal came down an hour later. I was in the living room with the TV turned down low, eating cold toast.

“Hi.” She ducked her head, letting her hair fall over her face as if I wasn't going to notice the bruise on her cheek. “You been up long?”

“No.” Sometimes I lie to people for no good reason at all. “Just a couple of minutes.”

“Oh.” She went into the kitchen. From there I could hear her slamming plates around. At first I just turned the TV up louder, but finally I got up and went after her. She was sitting at the table, which was cluttered with crushed cans of Miller.

“How's your baby?” I said. She looked at me, forgetting to cover her face. “Is your baby OK today?”

“Yeah, of course, why do you ask that?”

“I just didn't hear you getting sick this morning, that's all.”

“Oh, I slept right through my usual puke time, I guess. I was really tired. Me and your dad were up fighting last night. I wanted to go down to Florida to see my mom, but we don't have the money. I shouldn't have even asked, but with the baby and all . . .”

“Can't your mother come up here to see you?”

“Like she can afford it. The bus ticket costs over a hundred dollars one way.”

“Yeah, but sometimes round-trip is cheaper than one way,” I said. “When I went to North Carolina to visit my mom, Dad got a cheaper fare buying me a round-trip ticket even though you guys picked me up and drove me back on your way home from Florida.”

“A hundred dollars is still too much. Besides, I'd need money once I got there.”

I didn't say anything. She got up and started clearing away the cans. She hadn't even cleared half of them when she sat down again.

“He knew if he gave me the money to go, I wouldn't come back,” she said. “That's why he did this, Jenna. He's scared I'll take the baby and leave if he just gives me half a chance. I'm only telling you 'cause . . . well, I know you worry. I want you to know that what happened last night won't happen again. I've got no money, and I'm not gonna get any.”

“That doesn't matter,” I said. “He'll just get mad about something else.”

Tears filled her bloodshot eyes. “No, he won't. There's nothing left to be mad at. I got pregnant like he wanted. I've stopped working. I haven't seen my family in over a year. There's nothing left. Nothing.”

I looked around the room. Dishes spilled over in the sink, good for at least a few slaps, I figured. I stared at her stomach. Through the Formica table, the baby peered back at me.

“If you really want to leave, couldn't you just do it here? Do you have to go to Florida?”

She laughed. “What am I gonna do here, work all night at a diner while I'm nine months pregnant? Besides, there are no jobs here. My only hope was to get home to my mom.”

“Well then couldn't you get the money from someplace besides Dad? You wouldn't have to tell him or anything, you could just save until—”

“Jenna, stop it.” She turned her back to me so that I could no longer see the baby, waving and smiling at me, last night's antics forgotten. “The only way a girl like me makes that kind of money fast is on her back. And don't think I haven't thought of that either.” She turned to face me. “But I don't know a soul in this world interested in paying a married, pregnant, twenty-year-old with bruises on her face a hundred bucks a roll. And I must be even more screwed-up than I thought if I'm sitting here crying about my problems to you.”

She turned and left the kitchen. My toast had moved from cold to stiff. I threw it away.

For the following week, I was captivated by the image of Crystal as a high-class call girl. I'd seen a movie on TV a few months before about a prostitute who made more money than anybody could as a waitress. She wore glamorous clothes and got taken out for drinks by all kinds of rich men. Some of them even fell in love with her. When Crystal and I walked into town together, I tried to imagine the men standing around the gas station all going mad with desire for her, or the guys in Village Pizza offering to take her to New York for a weekend of passionate lovemaking. In the end, though, the fantasy was too ridiculous, and I abandoned it. Whenever anyone stopped Crystal on the street, it was to ask about the baby or my dad. Some guys yelled “Gimme some of that milk, honey” at her, but when she didn't talk back, they called her a cunt.

On closer consideration, when I imagined Crystal in the outfits a movie heroine might wear—slick, black miniskirts and high leather boots, like Julia Roberts in the ad for
Pretty Woman
—I practically burst out laughing. No one in Lebanon ever wore anything besides jeans, except for old ladies who wore house dresses. There was no place to go for expensive drinks, no hotel rooms that overlooked city lights. And Crystal was just a shy, pregnant girl who wore pink most days, not black, and did her eye shadow all wrong compared to women in the movies.

Mr. Logan had been flirting with me all year. My friends teased me about it in class, passing back and forth games of hangman that bore messages to decipher like,
Jenn gives Mr. Logan hand jobs in the darkroom
. Of course, all I ever really did in the darkroom was develop pictures for the school paper, and although I'd learned how to give a hand job the previous summer, as of yet, I'd had no occasion to put this new skill to use at school.

I was Mr. Logan's aide fourth period. I also had him sixth period for English and eighth period for Journalism. He was different from most of the small-town teachers at our school. He'd gone to prep school in Connecticut and was a Dartmouth alumni, which was how he came to teach in Lebanon. Even though he'd been here a decade, he still didn't pronounce Lebanon right, enunciating every syllable instead of saying “Leb'nin” the way any normal resident would. He didn't live in Lebanon either, he lived way out near Mascoma, right on the lake.

I first got the idea to seduce him when he asked me to be his aide in September, but since I had never actually seduced anyone, the idea soon fell by the wayside. By winter, we'd fallen into a titillating, uncomfortable routine of compliments (him to me) and sidelong glances (me to him). It was rumored that he'd had a disastrous affair with his previous aide, a senior named Deirdre who left town suddenly a week before her graduation and never returned. Some of my friends thought being his aide might not be the best move, considering. To me, though, this faint glimmer of scandal and passion in our dull little town made the idea all the more tantalizing.

It was late February. Crystal's pregnancy was starting to show. The baby was growing a large crop of orange hair, which no one could see but me. Although I wanted a girl, the baby appeared to be a boy, and sometimes now he sided with Dad when the fights broke out. Crystal, of course, didn't know what her baby was up to, but late at night I stayed awake thinking of our predicament enough for the both of us.

Now that Crystal had stopped working, Dad strode around the house with an air of confidence that incensed me, all his possessions in their places. One evening, after I got off the phone with my mother, he laughed at my suggestion that I could go visit her over spring break. From my room, I heard him tell Crystal that my mother was a stupid whore and that he'd be damned if I was ever going to stay with her and her filthy boyfriend again. Crystal said, “But all girls need to see their mothers,” and my dad popped the top off a beer can and said, “You don't know shit about the situation and what I went through to win that kid away from her and her drug addict friends. Just shut up and keep out of it.” After that, no one brought up my mother again.

There was no way out for me, I knew. If I tried to run to North Carolina, the court would only send me back again, or make me live in foster care like they'd threatened. I stirred in bed in the darkness, my fantasies of Mr. Logan merging with my fading images of Crystal as a call girl, with my dreams of going to live with my mom. I imagined my baby brother's possible salvation in Florida, where he could grow up like a boy on a TV sitcom instead of like my dad. I imagined my father's anger, red-faced and helpless, if he came home one day to find his son gone.

It was then that I began to plan Crystal's escape.

“Mr. Logan, do you think I'm fat?” I got down off the stool I was sitting on and turned around, pausing with my back to him to give sufficient time to scrutinize my body from behind.

“You girls and your obsession with weight,” he said. “If anything, you could stand to put on a few pounds.”

I pouted, the way the models do in
Seventeen
. “Then why don't I have a boyfriend?”

He looked surprised. Though he often joked around that he saw all the boys milling around me in the hallways, I usually only blushed and pretended not to hear him.

“I'm sure you could have all the boyfriends you want,” he said, then cleared his throat. “You're very pretty.”

I leaned against the table where I'd been cutting out articles to line up for print. “Yeah, sure, I could have boys at this school, but I don't like any of them. They're all so immature.”

He seemed to find this funny, so I said, “I guess you think I'm immature, too, huh?”

“No,” he said quickly. “I think you're very mature for your age.”

“But I'm not only talking about age,” I said. “I just don't fit in here. I want to do different things, not spend my whole life with some lame job like working in the hospital cafeteria. My dad's been working security at the prison in Windsor so long he might as well be in jail himself. At least the kids at Hanover High have parents who are Dartmouth professors and take them to Europe in the summer.” I glanced up at him. “I mean, you've been to boarding school and traveled, so you probably know what I'm talking about.”

“Yes,” he said. “Small towns can be very limiting, especially for a girl like yourself.”

“No one here wants anything from life. That's why I want someone more sophisticated. Someone who can teach me things.”

He turned his eyes away. I wondered if I had scared him, if the rumors about Deirdre had been only that, and he'd never dreamed a young girl could talk this way. My heart pounded with fear that he might call up my father and tell him I was turning into a harlot and to send me to Bible study or something. Finally, when he hadn't spoken in what seemed like forever, I knocked some papers off the table and squealed with surprise, the way women in TV movies do when they're about to have an unexpected office romance with their boss. He rushed over to help me pick them up. I could feel his nervousness hanging in the space between us. It encouraged me.