The V-Word (13 page)

It's the summer night that I stepped, unknowing, onto the roller coaster. When I went from being the weird, big-nosed, oversensitive, bookworm girl with my weird, fuzzy-haired friend in weird, ill-fitting clothes—

—to the zippered miniskirt girl, dancing with this boy: his hips against mine, his hands seeking mine, his fingers brushing that part of my neck. This is exactly the way it was supposed to happen.

At the end of the night I lick my lips and the clove cigarettes leave a salty stain. Then he kisses me and I've been kissed before, but this is his mouth and my mouth and Duran Duran and Thompson Twins and Prince, and his fingers wrap around mine, and Mel is waiting with his friend until we are done. That night and the next morning when I close my eyes it's like a chill in my belly and along my skin, and I replay everything he said and everything I said, over and over, and how his breath felt on my neck when we were dancing.

The next day I ask my mom if I can go to the mall with Mel and when we do, he's there. Just like he said he would be.

I wish you could picture us. The mall. How nervous I was that he wouldn't show.

Fifteen-year-old Aaron is a Christian. His family is Christian. I've just joined a Christian youth group, but I haven't yet been born again. I write a lot in my spiritual journal. I worry about sin and temptation. I worry about scattering instead of gathering. I worry that I'm too clothes conscious, that I lie too easily, that I use suggestive language. I'm jealous, I note in my journal, of non-Christians and their parties. I've never been to a party.

And then this: suddenly I have a boyfriend. He comes to my church, and I go to his. My mom likes him. His parents like me. It's summer. There are movies and groping on the couch under the afghan. There's going to the mall and dancing and clove cigarettes. I take his jacket as a joke and he lets me keep it. He has a bottle of Jim Beam under his bed and porn magazines he stole from his father. I wear the jacket everywhere. At night he calls me on the phone, “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

Aaron feels deeply. Love drives him crazy. He loves me so much he can't stand it. Often he does not sleep. He writes me letters in the middle of the night. They're about love and sex and God and boredom and drinking and the crushing weight of life. They're written on thin pieces of green paper. He carries around my picture.

He has pointy elbows, sparse black hairs on his chest. The soles of his feet are a different color. The chalky dryness of the skin on top of his knees. The bone above the arch of his foot. The place where his hair stops and there's just skin until his ear connects, the nape of his neck, even the word, nape. The long sweep of his body from his shoulders, down his back, down the back of his legs. The space between the cheeks of his ass and that pinching piece of skin under his balls and his balls, moving under all that wrinkly purple gray skin that changes from loose to taut.

And the laughing.

I'm fourteen, with my new body, and never have I been this aware, this intimate, with another person's body. Never have I felt before—startling, this!—some other person's folds.

His secret body. We are touching and kissing and laughing, and his hips and penis are pushing against my stomach, and we are laughing again.

It was all good, this. Touching the part of his fingertips where the nail met the skin. Feeling the swollen pads of his fingers.

I am the star of this story. Me as an object of desire. Me with a boyfriend. Me with a best friend. Me, me, me, me.

verse four

We're together anytime we can be, and there's everything between Aaron and me except penetration because we're Christian and fornicators will not inherit the Kingdom of God.

This makes it simple. Oral sex. Kissing. Aaron coming in his pants. Coming in my hand. Coming in my mouth. That's all okay. My mom and stepdad are gone a lot. His parents are gone a lot. There are marathon hours of
I want to but we can't
and all the things that feel good. His hands on me, my hands on him. Dizzying hours on his bed, the couch in his living room, my bed, other people's houses, parks. Before that night at the club, time stood still—everything breathing, waiting. Now everything balloons into a fever of letters and phone calls and his hand in mine.

When my mom and stepdad go away for the weekend and I'm supposed to be sleeping over at Mel's house, Aaron spends the night at my house, and we spend hours fooling around. Then we're in bed and the Bible is out and open on the bed, and we are reading and rereading passages and trying to find a work-around because we
do
want to inherit the Kingdom of God. We're talking and talking and talking, and then we have the dictionary out, and we're looking up
unrighteous
and
fornication
.

It's three in the morning.

I say, “Fuck it.”

He says, “Literally?”

I say, “Yes.”

And we have sex and two minutes later it's over and I can't believe it. It's not possible that
this
is fornication but Aaron says, “Let's do it again.”

And we do.

After that, school starts. Aaron is moody and drinking and I don't get to see him very often. We only have sex every once in a while because it's getting harder to find time alone. I use the sponge as birth control, and it seems very modern because it's advertised in magazines, but it's sticky and difficult to take out. I'm never sure if I'm doing it right but I must be because I don't get pregnant, not until years later when I try the pullout method, which, it turns out, is not really a method of birth control at all.

verse five

Aaron says he's drunk when he sends me the letter:
I love you, Erica. I love you, Erica. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Hundreds of times in back-slanted scrawl on both sides of the green unlined paper, he writes
I love you
, darker in places where his pencil presses too hard.

verse six

Aaron and I stay together for a few more months, and I spend a lot of time talking about Aaron with his best friend Noah, and then Noah and I kiss, and I break up with Aaron. It's Christmas. Aaron sends me roses and a card that says, “It was just the two of us in one world, and now it's each of us in our own separate worlds.” A few weeks later I break up with Noah and get back together with Aaron, but it's different now and doesn't last.

There's another boy after that, and I know I don't want to have sex with him but I don't know how to stop it once it starts. And it's hard to know what else to do when you have big empty swaths of time and you don't have anything you're moving toward. For me it's going to be writing, but I haven't figured that out yet.

Time speeds up. I stop going to church. Mel gets mono and misses almost a whole year of school and suddenly we're not friends anymore. I get a job at Sunshine Pizza and drop out of high school and start writing and start to feel like I'm good at something. I smoke a million cigarettes and read a million books and sleep with a million boys and I sleep with a girl and then another. I careen through depression and apartments and roommates and colleges and short stories. It's dizzying. I discover my own body and the pleasure it contains. I fall in love over and over in new ways.

Before, when I told the story of my first time, I always said that I dated this lovely boy and ours was a sweet, sweet love. But now when I reread Aaron's letters, I think that he was drinking far more than I understood. His was a different story, but I was so blinded by myself, by my hunger to be seen, I couldn't know him. And when he friended me last month, even though I didn't friend him back, I clicked around. He's still Christian, sober now, and I'm a lesbian with my own family, and I wish the story wrapped up in some neater way.

Aaron and I had all that. I'm talking about the joy. And then I kept looking for it again in a crush of bodies and emotions and urgency. But it wasn't until much later, with a woman, that I found that joy again. But maybe that's the way it works. Maybe I needed the crush and tangle of limbs and years to get here.

The first time.

We peel off clothes.

We slide toward naked, entering sex as if it were just us, just two people's bodies. Simple and uncomplicated. But we are rarely bare and unburdened. These bodies of ours—magnificent, strong, ripe—are often so deeply buried under outside and inside judgments that it can be hard to hear ourselves. It's easy to disconnect from the body and push its wants and needs below the surface.

For Kate, it took many years to unbraid her body from a complicated tangle of shame and silence.

D
ivide what you have into three equal sections. Grab the right section with your right hand and the left section with your left hand, letting the middle section hang free (for now).

Shame is hard to hold in one hand, its gristle sharp and slimy at the same time. My mother is telling me not to walk that way, not to talk so loud. She's researching hormone treatments to stunt my growth because I'm five-feet-nine-inches tall in sixth grade and she's afraid I'll be a giant. My wrists stick beyond shirt-sleeves. My ankles stick below the legs of my pants. I know I don't fit the family. I'm different. I'm not right.

These are the messages I hold in one hand.

Hold tight.

What happens when breasts grow early is that other people notice, especially men. At parties, at the grocery store, at the post office in our small town, men touch my arm, crowd me in lines, carry my groceries. The town pediatrician squeezes my breasts for lumps when I am nine years old.

In the New England winter, the neighbors' garage becomes a movie house where I run the projector on “old movie night.” The black-and-white actors walk on a distant screen, film clattering in the sprockets. At intermission I try to dodge the old men who circle the hors d'oeuvre table and try to touch my butt or brush against my braless breasts. When I mention the way the men act to my sisters, they say, “Oh, that's Mr. So-and-So,” as if how long he's been misbehaving excuses him, as if I'm the one with the problem for saying something out loud.

In the left hand, hold silence, greasy and clotted. Let the middle section hang free (for now).

A girl at school changes the words to a camp song:

My Daddy lies over the ocean,

My Daddy lies over the sea,

My Daddy lies over my Mommy,

And that's what became of me.

When I get home that day, I chase my mother who is retreating into her office and sing it for her because my pubescent mind thinks the song clever. In the dim autumn light, her face drains like the painting called
The Scream
, and she turns around and walks away.

Her office door closes.

Rumor has it that an eighth-grade girl had an abortion. Other girls I know are sneaking out of their homes at night to meet boys. The mysteries of body and boy are beyond me. When I start my period at age eleven, my mother hands me a Kotex pamphlet about menstruation and never brings the topic up again. No one takes the time to have The Talk with me. There is no sex ed. No one in biology explains reproductive organs.

In biology class, when the teacher asks us to write what we feel about sex, he says, “Be honest.” When I write, “The topic of sex embarrasses me,” the teacher reads out loud what I've written, points me out, cannot contain his laugh. My hippie sister with long blond braids comes home from college and tells me to use tampons because they will help with sex. The blush on my face hides the gap in understanding.

Cross the left section over the middle section.

That middle section of the braid is my body.

At my all-girls boarding school I discover Want. Taller than most girls, more developed than many, with no men prowling to rub themselves on me, I grow into my body a little.

Before I am sixteen years old, I go home from boarding school for a weekend to help an old friend and his wife who have a new baby. During the night, this man stumbles into the room where I sleep, and he is drunk, and he kisses me, pouring his beer-sour breath into me, putting his big fingers into me, too. When his hand tries to open my legs wider, I push him away, and he moves away. When he leaves, I don't sleep. The irony keeps me awake—sweet sixteen and never been kissed. When the saying leaves my head, I wonder about men and fingers and hymens. I don't know if I'm a virgin anymore.

During the rest of high school, the middle section of the braid—my body—lifts to the top. I hug friends too long. I play varsity sports. One night two friends and I look for mischief and find the door unlocked to the old gym, and the girls and I lie on a stack of gymnastics mats and roll into each other and onto each other and never say a word.

A week before college starts, my mother drops me off to see the town pediatrician who no longer touches my breasts because a nurse is required to be in the room when I undress. He gives a speech about boys in college and how they drink and how, if they jump on top of me, I should “sit back and enjoy the ride.” My mother and I do not speak when she picks me up from the doctor's office.

Between freshman and sophomore year of college, I ride a train to Arizona to become a counselor at a horse camp. At eighteen years old I've never been to a camp, been a counselor, or seen the desert. Horses scare me. The first night the assistant director, whose camp name is Lizard, stands up to welcome everyone, and I think, “That is the ugliest woman I've ever seen.” My body cringes.

By the third night in the Arizona mountains, I am freezing because I assumed Arizona would be hot and only brought shorts and T-shirts. Lizard and I meet late at night outdoors, which is very dark and dangerous. (New England doesn't have mountain lions, bears, scorpions, tarantulas. Arizona does.) For the first time in my life, my body tops my mind. The cringe of a few days ago turns to jitters in Lizard's presence, her overt desire, her lean twenty-four-year-old body.