Towelhead (27 page)

“Hold on a second.”

“I need a tissue,” I said, feeling the tickle of liquid on my skin. “It's going to spill on the bed.”

“Okay,” he said, and he stood and went in the bathroom. When he came back with the tissue, he cleaned me up himself. “Did you like that?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. I wasn't actually sure if I'd liked it or not, but when Thomas's voice made it sound like he thought that I had, it made me want to agree.

“Next time I'm going to come on your tits,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. I tried not to show how excited I was that he seemed to be talking about doing it again without my having to tell him why I wasn't a virgin.

He balled up the tissues then and said, “Let's go see if she thawed.”

 

She hadn't. Plus she was starting to stink a little. Thomas said he didn't smell anything, but I figured he was probably just doing that so he wouldn't have to admit that he'd been wrong. “We have to wrap her back up,” I said.

“Or,” Thomas said, “we could put her in the microwave. Just for, like, thirty seconds.”

“No,” I said. He was beginning to remind me of the boys at school who told gross jokes about animals in ovens and dryers and dishwashers.

“It's disrespectful not to close her eyes,” Thomas said.

“It's more disrespectful to put her in the microwave.”

“Not if you're only doing it to close her eyes.”

I thought about this. I couldn't really tell what was right. “What if she starts to stink some more?” I said.

“She won't,” Thomas said. “Not for thirty seconds.”

She did, though. It wasn't too bad, but it wasn't very good, either. Even Thomas admitted he could smell her now. Plus, when the thirty seconds was up, he still couldn't shut her eyes. “We have to put her back in the freezer,” I said, and this time he listened to me.

I watched Thomas wrap Snowball just as Daddy had watched me the night before. When he didn't do something right, I told him, but not in an unfriendly way, like Daddy. Thomas didn't like that he had to put her back inside so many plastic bags, but I said that if he didn't, I could get in trouble. “How are you going to get in trouble?” he asked. “I mean, is your dad seriously going to check how many bags she's in before he throws her in the trash?”

“I don't know,” I said. “He might.”

“I just find that very hard to believe,” Thomas said, which kind of hurt my feelings, even though it was probably true that Daddy wouldn't check the bags. I just didn't know how to explain to Thomas that that wasn't the point. The point was that at all times, I needed to keep as many things as possible the way Daddy liked them.

We kissed good-bye in the living room; then I opened the front door. When we stepped outside, Mr. Vuoso was in his yard, taking down his flag. “There's the guy from your article,” Thomas said, and he laughed a little.

“Shh,” I said.

“Why?” Thomas asked.

“He doesn't really like the way the article came out.”

Thomas shrugged. “It seemed all right to me. I mean, for being about an asshole.”

Just then, Mr. Vuoso started walking toward us. “Oh no,” I said.

“I'll handle this,” Thomas said.

“Jasira,” Mr. Vuoso said, stepping onto our lawn. He had his triangle-folded flag tucked under his arm.

“Yes?”

“What's going on here?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“What do you mean what's going on here?” Thomas asked.

“Am I talking to you, son?” Mr. Vuoso said.

“I'm not your son,” Thomas said.

“Does your father know he's over here?” Mr. Vuoso asked me.

I didn't say anything.

“Leave her alone,” Thomas said, and he changed the way he was standing so that he suddenly seemed a little taller.

Mr. Vuoso ignored him. “You come and talk to me when he's gone,” he said, then he turned and walked back to his house.

“Who the fuck does he think he is?” Thomas asked, so that Mr. Vuoso could probably still hear.

I shrugged.

“Don't you dare go and talk to him,” Thomas said.

“I won't,” I said, and I meant it. Something about the way Mr. Vuoso was acting was reminding me of the day he had hurt me.

“Go in the house and lock the door right now,” Thomas said.

I nodded and went inside. After locking the door, I pulled back the living room curtain and waved to Thomas as he walked down the street. When he was out of sight, I let the curtain drop and went in the kitchen to look things over. Everything seemed fine except it still kind of smelled. I got a can of air freshener from the cupboard in the laundry room and sprayed it around, only that just made a grosser smell of the dead cat plus gardenias. I went around the house opening windows then, and while I was doing the ones in the living room, the doorbell rang. I froze. “Jasira,” I heard Mr. Vuoso say. I didn't move. “I know you're in there,” he said a second later.

“Yes?” I said, trying to sound as friendly as possible.

“Open the door!” he said.

I didn't open it.

“Now!” he yelled.

Finally, I pulled the living room curtain aside and looked out at him. “What is it?” I asked.

“Open this door,” he said, craning his neck a little from where he stood on the steps.

“Just tell me what you want to say like this.”

“Goddammit!” he said. “I told you to come and see me when that kid left.”

“I don't want to come and see you,” I said.

“Oh no?” he said.

I shook my head.

He just stood there on the steps for a second. Then he came down and walked over to the window screen. He didn't watch out for the little marigolds Daddy had planted under the sill, just stepped right on them. “What were you doing with that nigger?” he demanded.

“Nothing.”

“You tell me what you did with him, or I'm going to come over and tell your father he was here, and I don't care how hard he beats you.”

It made me catch my breath a little, to hear someone talk about Daddy beating me. “Please don't tell Daddy that Thomas was here,” I said.

“Just tell me what you did with him.”

I didn't say anything.

“Did you let him fuck you?”

I still didn't say anything.

“Jesus Christ.”

“You said you wouldn't tell on me.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said again.

 

When Daddy came home, he said, “What smells?”

“Huh?” I said. I breathed deeply to show him that I had no idea what he was talking about.

“There's a bad smell in here,” he said, pointing his nose in different directions.

“I can't smell it,” I said.

“Is it the garbage?” He opened the door under the kitchen sink. The bag was full, and he said, “Take out this garbage, Jasira.”

I nodded and went to tie up the white plastic bag.

“We're going to get bugs if you don't keep up with your chores,” he said. “And if we get bugs, you're going to pay for the exterminator out of your savings.”

“Okay,” I said.

“They're very expensive,” he warned.

I waited for Daddy to tell me to take Snowball out, too, but he didn't. I wasn't sure if he'd forgotten, but I didn't remind him. I knew she was dead, but still, I couldn't stand to think of her getting smushed in the garbage truck.

 

The next day at school, Thomas wanted to know what had happened with Mr. Vuoso. “Nothing,” I said. “He came over and tried to talk to me but I wouldn't open the door.”

“What did he want to talk about?”

“I don't know,” I lied.

Thomas was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Is he in love with you?”

“What?”

“Does he love you?”

“No,” I said, although the idea that Thomas thought Mr. Vuoso loved me made me want to hear more.

“He talks to you like he does,” Thomas said. “That's what you do when you love someone. You boss them around, but they don't notice. Only other people can notice.”

“I don't think he loves me,” I said.

“He might.”

“I don't think so.”

Still, for the rest of the day, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Mostly, I thought Mr. Vuoso didn't like me, but that he wanted to fool around. It had never occurred to me that there might be something else.

In study hall, Denise and I passed notes back and forth. Hers said:
Mr. Joffrey has a girlfriend. I can't believe it.
Then she made a frowning face with a small tear on the cheek.

I wrote back:
How do you know?

She said:
Because he finally read my horoscopes, and he said the one about his girlfriend was really accurate.

What did it say?
I asked her.

That if you're a Gemini, this month will find you successful in your career and radiating beauty.

Oh.

It's like he was shoving it in my face,
she wrote.
Maybe he just wanted to let you down easy.

No,
she wrote,
he wanted to shove it in my face!

I'm sorry,
I wrote.

She asked me how it was going with Mr. Vuoso, and I said fine. I didn't tell her that he had gotten mad about my article, that he had frightened me the day before, that he might be in love with me.

She wrote back that she was jealous, that I was lucky, that if I found out his birthday, she would write him a good horoscope for next month.

 

That afternoon when I got home from school, I did my homework. Then I turned on the TV and set up the ironing board. Since I had lost my job with the Vuosos, Daddy had offered to pay me to press his shirts instead of taking them to be laundered. He gave me a dollar fifty each, and said that as soon as I started doing a crappy job, he would head straight back to the cleaners.

Each shirt took about fifteen minutes, and I had finished nearly five of them when the doorbell rang at around six. I went to the front door, but instead of opening it, I checked out the window first to see who it was. When I saw Mr. Vuoso, I opened the window and said, “Hi.”

“Hi,” he said. He seemed a lot calmer than he had the day before. “Can I come in?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Daddy might be home soon.”

Mr. Vuoso looked at his watch. “Are you sure? It's a little early yet.”

“Can't we just talk like this?”

“Sure,” Mr. Vuoso said, even though I could tell he seemed a little disappointed.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “mostly I just wanted to apologize for yesterday. How I acted. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“No,” he said. “It's not. That was no way to talk to you.”

I didn't say anything. I didn't think anything would ever feel so good to me as when Mr. Vuoso felt sorry.

He took a deep breath then. “Also, I wanted to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” I said.

He nodded. “I got called up.”

I looked at him through the screen. He had stayed on the steps today and was just kind of leaning over toward me as we spoke. “But the war is over,” I said.

He laughed a little. “The fighting part is over. They still need plenty of help.”

I didn't understand. Not when Daddy had said that Mr. Vuoso probably wouldn't get called up. But I guessed that Daddy didn't know what he was talking about. He didn't know what he was talking about a lot of the time. “Could you get killed?” I asked.

“I don't think so,” Mr. Vuoso said. “I mean, I hope not.”

“I didn't think you would have to go since the war ended.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

“I don't want you to go.”

“I'll be back,” he said.

I didn't know what to say then.

“Anyway,” he said, “good-bye.”

I watched him turn and go down the front steps. When he had gotten about halfway down the front walk, I said, “Wait,” and I went and opened the front door.

He stopped walking and turned around.