Slut Lullabies (25 page)

I began to dress while he watched me from the bed. “Maybe you should be asking that question about yourself,” I said.

It was hard to sleep that night. He gave me the money the following day during fourth period, then took me in the darkroom and began extracting the service he was paying for. This lasted well through fifth period, after which I had to go to the washroom to straighten myself up before going to his sixth period class. I drifted through English, then Journalism, in a strange, surreal state. My lips felt raw and numb, and my jaw ached terribly. Meeting his eyes seemed impossible, so I doodled in my notebook. He ignored me in English, but in Journalism he scolded me for not paying attention. After class, I went to the bathroom and threw up.

Mr. Logan told me that tomorrow I would be going to his house after school. He instructed that I was to come up with a more credible excuse than lying about gymnastics practice. On my way home, I debated whether or not I should refuse to go with him anymore, whether I should threaten to tell if he tried to force me. I knew that I had enough ammunition to frighten him sufficiently so that he would allow me to leave. The thought of him hating me so much, though, made stopping now seem inconceivable. I spent the rest of my walk home trying to come up with plausible excuses for my future late arrivals home.

Crystal was at the house alone when I arrived. She was watching
General Hospital
. I went and sat down next to her and took out the envelope Mr. Logan had given me.

“I have something for you.”

She took it and opened it. When she saw the money, she looked like she'd seen a ghost.

“What is all this? Where'd you get this?”

“I saved it,” I said. “I want you to have it. For Florida.”

“Florida? You mean to visit my mom? Honey, you should use it to visit your mom.”

“No,” I said. “To go there for good. To leave Dad and take the baby like you said.”

She actually half laughed. “Oh, Jenna. That was just talk. I would never leave your dad. I love him. We're having a baby. I was just upset.”

Something in my chest sank, so powerful I thought my insides had all collapsed at once. I couldn't speak. I looked at her hard, at the bruise on her right eye that had been made just a few days before in a fight about the furnace. I made some kind of a noise.

Crystal stood up. She began to walk around the room, speaking in crisp tones, her hands slicing the air to emphasize her words. “
Look
, Jenna, I
know
you and your dad don't get along so good. But he loves us both
very
much. He just has a bad temper. But he's been a
lot
better since I quit my job, and if you didn't sass back at him all the time, he'd be a lot nicer to
you
, too. It was sweet of you to try and give me your money. But you
don't
have to worry about me.”

“But you said you wanted to leave him!” I said, louder than I'd meant to. “I want you to go, Crystal. He's mean to you, just like he was mean to my mom. You shouldn't stay here. My dad is too old for you, what do you want with him anyway?”

She put her fluttering hands firmly on her hips as if to keep them still. “Your dad is only thirty-four, for heaven's sake! I'm grateful for all he's done for me. I was going nowhere when I met him—I got stoned all the time and did it with any guy. Now I'm married with a family and an income and a house. I have everything I ever wanted.”

“But he calls you names! He hits you! He hits both of us!”

She looked embarrassed. “Jenna, just stop that. He's not so bad. And our problems are between us. Now why don't you just get out of the house until dinner and cool down?”

I snatched the envelope away from her, afraid I would burst into tears. She watched me, defensive, angry, and amused all at the same time. The baby inside her pushed his hair out of his clear blue eyes, shrugged, and turned away. I stumbled backward and grabbed my coat.

“Yeah,” I said, “I think I'll do that. See you later.”

“Six thirty,” she said. “Remember, don't be late.”

The bus from White River Junction cost one hundred and eight dollars to Florida, one way. I wasn't sure how much less it would cost to get to North Carolina, but with three hundred and forty dollars in my pocket (forty I'd saved from babysitting), I figured I could get there fine and even take a taxi to my mother's apartment since I didn't know the buses. They would know where I'd gone, of course. They might even be waiting for me when I arrived. But I would tuck the rest of my money into my underwear and claim I'd spent it, and when they dragged me home, I'd leave again, and keep leaving until my dad got fed up and let Social Services take me. Anywhere but home.

I didn't think about much as I boarded the bus. Some man in his forties or fifties stared at me and winked from the seat across the way. My stomach turned, and I looked away quickly.

“Hey sweetie,” the man said. “Where you goin' all by yourself?”

“To see my boyfriend.” Sometimes I say things that could clearly get me into trouble. “He's much better looking than an old fart like you, so just give it up.”

“Well nice to meet you, too, you uptight little bitch,” the man said, but he laughed, and I was relieved; at least he was not likely to shoot me if he was laughing. He looked like the kind to own a gun, like my father. Maybe more than one gun. I wondered if he polished them the way my father did, if he had ever held one up to his first wife's pregnant stomach and threatened to blow the baby inside away, the baby she would later lose after he pushed her down a flight of stairs. I stared out the window as the bus started up.

One thing my dad always said was that it doesn't pay to put yourself on the line for somebody else. They don't appreciate it, and half the time you can't guess what another person really wants to begin with. But then I've never done anything for anyone else's sake anyway, so that has nothing to do with me.

Suddenly, Jayne is afflicted with acne. It makes no sense; she is thirty-three. The same age as Jesus Christ, as Blaine keeps reminding her. In high school, her face was clear, if a bit ruddy like her mother's. Mom gave Jayne big bones and red cheeks and a Polish nose that looks innocuous at a glance but on closer scrutiny resembles a lump of Play-Doh. Jayne would like to blame Blaine's waning interest on the inexplicable hormonal disaster playing itself out on her skin. But let's face it, before Blaine, she had not had a relationship, gotten laid, or gone on a date—even a bad one—in five years; plus, lots of ugly people are married and most married people are ugly. So she has no choice but to blame her personality.

Mom, meanwhile, is swinging from the proverbial coital rafters with some married hypocrite who works for the Archdiocese of Chicago and is never going to leave his wife. Which is only fair, since Mom herself works for the Archdiocese and is married to Marty, Jayne's Jewish stepfather, whom she does not intend to leave because it would be “too expensive.” Jayne cannot recall what horrible utterance on her own part prompted her mother to reveal this torrid affair—over the phone no less—but since, Mom's confession has resulted in her calling Jayne daily like a best friend from junior high. Mom calls with some fake veneer of advice about how to stain Jayne's dining room chairs or a new use for fat-free Cool Whip, and ends up offering cringe-worthy details from her love life. It is, truly, too much.

Blaine says that Jayne likes to cast herself as the tragic heroine of her own life. But what sane person would not be upset that her fiftysomething mother surpasses her in feminine wiles and is bonking some fellow Catholic and just begging God to strike them dead? As if marrying a Jew was not rebellion enough. Her mother is the black widow. Her mother has black lingerie. Jayne has zits and increasingly feels like live veal in the cramped, dark box of her apartment, waiting for her phone to ring. She has no tangible reason other than pride not to wear briefs with holes around the elastic waistband.

So come on.

The phone rings at work. Jayne cradles the receiver in the wool of her sweatered shoulder, chirps like a Stepford Wife, “Saint Xavier's Day School, how can I help you?”

“Honey,” Mom says. “You sound thin. Let me take you to lunch.”

“I . . . sound . . . thin?”

“Wan,” Mom clarifies. “Insubstantial. Peaked.” If she'd had the money to attend, her mother would never have dropped out of college. “What do you say? I'll pick you up so I can say hello to everyone.”

“Whatever. I can't be late back to work like last time—the fundraising auction's on Friday night; I'm swamped.”

“See you soon then!” Mom sounds breathless, like a porn star. “I can't wait.”

“The stigma against infidelity is more about honesty than about
sex
,” Blaine said the first time he told her he was not “into” monogamy. “It's an issue of one illegal fuck making future acts of deception easier—you get acclimated to lying, so pretty soon you don't just lie about big stuff like where your dick was last night, but anything, like where you work, how much you drink, what you ate for dinner. It's like you have to stay in practice. Deceit's rough. That's why I'm up front—I cut all that shit off at the pass.”

It was typical of Blaine to twist everything so that the partner being cheated on (à la Jayne; à la Marty) became an irrelevant sidebar to some broader, esoteric moral question—one that somehow spit him out smelling like a rose atop a pile of misguided bourgeois turds. Now, watching Mom waltz into the Day School on the arm of a stiff-backed, salt-and-pepper-haired facsimile of J. Peterman from
Seinfeld
, Jayne's nostalgia for deception and repression is as sharp as cardiac arrest—has Blaine gotten to Mom, too?

“Sophie,” booms Mom. “This is Lawrence. Larry, this is my Sophie Jane.”

Jayne mouths, “Uh.”

Beaming with the authority of a woman with her husband's checkbook in her handbag and her lover's semen warm and glowing inside her, Mom says, “I've so wanted you two to meet. Let's splurge and go to Season's. Sophie, they have lots of healthy, low-cal options.”

Lawrence holds the door open for them, also grinning—he is an argyle and toothy breed: executive jocular. He doesn't look religious. Doesn't have the same weird, rapturous vacancy in his eyes her mother often wears, or that breathy voice so common in holy women, the Carl Rodgers counselor-speak so common in the men. He looks like an extraordinarily subtle car salesman, or a politician's sharkish brother. He looks like the kind of man you can immediately imagine owning a penis, a phenomenon both disquieting and rare. Jayne takes the door from him, stands with its knob in her hand until he slinks forward to join her mother. With the heavy-footed trudge of her adolescence, she trails them to what she is certain will be a shiny silver luxury car.

“Hurry up, Sophie. You're the one who doesn't want to be late!” Mom reaches, without thought—always without thought—for Lawrence's hand; Jayne nearly covers her eyes. But no, it is over, they will not start making out right here on the street. Lawrence, out of some vestige of shame, perhaps from his pre-adulterous days, has oh-so-subtly pulled his hand away.

Snapshot number nine: Dad wearing a suede, fringed “draft dodger” jacket, red bandana barely visible below new, jauntily-angled cop's cap, mouth open from singing “Magic Carpet Ride” by Steppenwolf, unidentifiable bottle in wedding-ring hand resting on Formica counter.

Subtext: Mom chose
this
as the photo to be displayed. Though Dad's relatives don't like it (Sophie has heard their whispers for three days straight), nobody says anything because Mom is the one who found Dad in the bedroom with half his head blown off, and they all agree this was “traumatic,” though none of them can seem to bring themselves to get near her. They keep staring as though she pulled the trigger. At the luncheon afterward, at Red Apple, Sophie is invisible and bored. She sits under Dad's sisters' table, watching smoke from their Benson & Hedges drift across the room, pretending to inhale on her straw.

Script:

“He finally confessed to Ma that the bitch was screwing around—with his own partner, can you even fucking believe! She had the gall to ask him for a divorce just three days before he . . . I mean, he never even
looked
at anyone but her, not since he was fourteen. Geez, plenty of my friends woulda killed to go out with him. That poor little girl, to have a mother like that, but I have to tell you, the kid looks so much like her, it's just . . . I know it's not right, but the sight of her makes me sick.”

Jayne has not been home long enough to remove her shoes, has only just poured a Jameson and downed one long sip, when the phone rings.

“Hey, baby.” Glorious, half-drunk, Southern drawling. Blaine. “We still on for Friday?”

“Oh, um . . .” Has he forgotten that they have not seen each other in three weeks? Can casual heroin use cause amnesia? “I thought you work Friday nights.”

“Oh, I get it, Diamond Girl,” he says. “You have another date.”

“No, I—”
Stupid, stupid, should have said yes
. “That's not what I meant.”

“Did you have a bad day, baby? You sound stressed.”

“A bad day? My mother and her
lover
came to take me to lunch.”

“Oh. Cool. Is he hot?”

“Blaine, the woman has been married for nearly twenty years.”

“So what you're saying is that she really deserves to finally have a little fun.”

“So what
you're
saying is relationships aren't fun? That's why you're calling?”

“Girl, don't make me come over there and smack you around.” He is smirking through the phone wires and right into her churning stomach. “I'm on till 2 AM tonight—do you have any idea what kind of whack jobs have need of a Kinkos past midnight? Don't give me a hard time.”