Uses for Boys (2 page)

When it dies the stepbrother looks down at his hands. He doesn’t say anything, just
drops the little body in the bark dust and walks back inside the house and locks the
door to his room.

I follow him and stand at the top of the stairs listening. I think maybe I can hear
him, but then it’s like I don’t hear anything.

In the bathroom I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t look like my mom anymore.
I don’t look like anyone. I look at my reflection. This lying house tricks the birds.
Why do we live in this lying house?

I hate this house.

The TV is still on and I walk around the empty upstairs. The TV is so loud I can hear
it from under my bed where I keep a blanket and my favorite stuffed animals. I climb
under and gather them around me.

“We’re a family,” I say and hold them tight.

the dream

Nobody wants to be in the lying house. The stepbrothers stay away. They go to their
mother’s. They stay with friends. Their rooms are empty. My mom and the stepdad leave
early to go to work. They come home late. They come in after I’m supposed to be asleep.
They lean and laugh in the hall, bumping into things. They speak too loudly.

My mom opens my door and asks why I left the TV on, why all the lights are on. Her
voice is strange. Then she walks away leaving the door open and I hear them leaning
and bumping in their room.

I have a dream and in it everyone in the world is racing to the same place on the
globe. I can see the whole globe and the frantic racing. It’s a buzzing, like the
static of the television and it gets faster and louder until I wake up. I fall back
to sleep, but later the dream returns.

“Stay home with me,” I say to my mom. “I don’t want to be alone.” It’s morning and
I’m watching her get ready in the bathroom that smells like the stepfather.

“You’re not alone,” my mom says. She’s thinking of the stepbrothers. “And besides,
you should make some friends. Don’t you want to make friends?” And then she puts on
her lipstick and blots it on a piece of toilet paper.

I want to tell her about the dream. Even awake I can hear the buzzing at the edges
of things. I look down at my bare feet. Hers are already in stockings and heels. She
steps past me.

“Have a good day,” she says, leaving.

summer

Summer stretches out and my mom redecorates. She hires men who tear out all the carpeting
and replace it with unbroken expanses of beige. The stepdad pays for everything. She
buys bedroom sets, a living room set, and one for the family room. Everything matches.
She paints my room yellow and buys me a yellow dress to match. I’m almost ten. I hate
yellow dresses.

The stepbrothers won’t let her touch their rooms. They lock their doors. They shun
us. I hang around the hallway hoping they’ll talk to me. We have imaginary conversations.
I hate all the same things they do. I make fake blood out of the berries on the Oregon
grape outside their window and hope they’ll notice my smudgy fingerprints on the light
switches. But they’re like spies. They enter the house through the side door, close
the vents so I can’t hear them talk, eat their meals after I’ve gone to sleep.

fall

It’s still hot when the school year starts. All the kids already know each other and
I am too something for them. Too quiet or strange. Too sad, one girl says. I sit alone
on the bus and stare out the window. I drag my backpack along the ground on the way
home from the bus stop. I arrange my stuffed animals along the wall of my room, the
little ones in front.

winter

At first I don’t notice when the stepfather stops coming home. By spring it’s over.

spring

“Why?” I ask my mom.

“Men leave,” she says. “Just like my father,” she says. “Just like yours.”

the big house

It’s raining when the stepbrothers emerge from their rooms. The divorce is almost
final and they’re moving out. They wear a uniform of worn sneakers and faded green
army coats and they drag their stuff out of their rooms in large green duffle bags.
They walk right past me in the hall without saying a word. Then they’re gone and it’s
strange to see their doors ajar. The carpet in their rooms doesn’t match the rest
of the house.

I poke around looking for signs of them, but there’s only a pile of dirty clothes
on the bathroom floor. My mom watches me and then sighs and goes back upstairs. This
time there’s no crying. She rearranges the furniture and spends long hours at her
new job. The one she has to dress up for and travel for. The divorce is decided and
we stay in the big house alone, my mom and me.

“It’s such a beautiful house,” she says.

after the divorce

Everything changes.

My mom never goes downstairs. She doesn’t mention the stepfather. She never mentions
the stepbrothers. She comes home late and I don’t know where she goes. She sprays
her hair with hairspray and I stand in the doorway to the bathroom and watch. She
sprays perfume on her neck and then leaves, turning off the light and stepping past
me. I follow her around in my pajamas and she says, before she leaves, hurry up and
get dressed. Then she takes her coat from the hall closet and a green leather briefcase
that she leaves on a kitchen chair.

“Don’t miss the bus,” she says. But instead, I get in her bed and snuggle in the sheets.
They still smell like her. I look at the picture of her mother that she hung back
up on the wall. The one where her mother is looking at nothing, at something, in the
distance.

“She’s so alone,” my mom always says when she looks at it.

I watch the minutes change on the alarm clock.

At 7:35, I get dressed and eat cereal in front of the TV. I walk to the bus stop and
stand near the other kids. When I come home after school I unlock the door with the
key I keep in my backpack. I turn on the TV in the living room and leave it on through
the after-school specials, through the evening news, through the shows I like to watch
before I go to bed. I eat pizzas from the freezer and leave my dishes in the sink.
Once a week the cleaning lady comes and she runs the dishwasher.

Sometimes I go downstairs and sit in the empty rooms. I can hear the TV from upstairs.
I wonder where the stepbrothers are now.

boys

My classroom looks out at the parking lot and there’s nothing to see there.

“There’s nothing to see out there, Anna,” Ms. Wenderoth says and I turn to look straight
ahead at the boy in front of me. Mark or Matt. Richard or Tom. Any boy. Some back-of-the-neck
boy. Some Mark-Joe-Matt-Richard-Tom-Billy-Chris boy. Just a shoving-in-the-hall boy.
A milk-through-his-nose boy. Just boys. Just there. Like teachers and desks and powdered
soap in the girls’ bathroom.

I’m thirteen and now I have a friend, Nancy Baxter. She sits in the front of the classroom.
She doesn’t care much for boys.

After school, at her house, Nancy’s older sister offers to braid our hair if we sit
still in front of the mirror. So we sit like that, Nancy and me, as still as we can,
side by side in chairs facing the mirror in their pink bathroom, towels folded neatly
on the rack behind us.

Nancy’s sister is reflected in the mirror, looking at herself, her hands automatically
plaiting Nancy’s thin blond hair. I can tell she doesn’t need to concentrate, she
knows Nancy that well. And they look alike, they have the same distracted, open-mouth
gaze. Happy. Like it’s so easy to be them. To be sisters. They don’t even question
it. Or the sound of their mom, moving around in the next room.

I want to be like Nancy is now, eyes closed, sister tugging at my hair. I close my
eyes and pretend that I have a sister who can braid my hair without looking. That
this is my family. My home. I lean my head back and feel hands pulling gently against
my scalp.

I drift. Hands deft in my hair. My mom next to me. Our faces together in the mirror.
I drift, but when I open my eyes again Nancy is looking at my reflection. Sometimes
Nancy catches me doing this, caught up in wanting something she has and I don’t even
know why I do it. I just know that Nancy won’t come to my house anymore. She says
that it’s weird that nobody is ever home. She told her mom and after that her mom
called my mom and said she didn’t want the girls playing alone anymore and from now
on I could come to their house.

Nancy’s sister is talking about boys but they’re nothing like the boys in our school.
They do things with the girls. Secret things. And Nancy’s sister says she knows what
to do with them. She knows what they’re good for. I’m watching her talk and braid
with her fingers and she’s looking at herself like she’s weighing her good features
against her bad and talking about boys like Nancy and I know what she’s talking about.

And then Nancy’s mom comes in and says, “Shush, what are you telling these girls?”
And Nancy runs out giggling and at first I don’t follow, because her sister hasn’t
braided my hair yet, but then I do.

*   *   *

When Nancy’s mom drops me off at my house, I use my key to let myself in. The porch
light and one in the kitchen. Nancy’s mom doesn’t know that my mom is out because
my mom and I leave lights on.

Or maybe she does, because she says, “Are you going to be alright, Anna?” And I say
that I am.

But my mom doesn’t come home that night. She calls, because it’s important to call
if you’re not going to come home, she says, and she says that since I’m a big girl
now, I can feed myself and put myself to bed. She always says that. I can hear a lot
of voices in the background and I know that she forgets. She thinks each Charlie or
James or Michael is unique. She forgets that the things she says about this one are
the same as the things she said about that one. She believes that each one is the
one and she says each name like it’s the only man’s name she’s ever said. Tonight
she says James like it’s a magic word. She’s going to stay with James, she says.

“OK,” I say. And then I put the phone back in its cradle and walk around the house
turning on the lights.

on the bus

The next day, coming home on the bus, Desmond Dreyfus sits next to me. He’s laughing
with his friends and I’m not paying attention because when I don’t go to Nancy’s house
I ride the bus to my house and I always sit alone. I’m looking out the window and
wondering if there are still pizzas in the freezer. But then Desmond moves up to the
seat next to me and sits really close so our thighs touch and he says my name quietly
so only we can hear.

“Anna,” he says. “You’re so pretty,” and he looks at me like it’s the first time he’s
ever seen me.

Everything flushes warm. The sun slants through the bus windows in bright shards.
One on my lap. One across his face. In my head, I’m telling Nancy the story of how
it happened. I’m narrating the story of how Desmond Dreyfus sat next to me, how his
brown hair fell into his eyes when he said I was pretty. I’m thinking about Nancy,
and Desmond Dreyfus puts his hand on the outside of my shirt right over my breast
and the thin cotton bra that my mom bought for me. I’m surprised, but I don’t say
anything.

I think maybe he’s making fun of me. My breasts are pointy and I don’t think that’s
what they’re supposed to look like. Nancy doesn’t have pointy ones and hers are bigger
and in the bathtub my rib bones jut out higher than my breasts and I don’t think that’s
the way it’s supposed to be. But now Desmond has his whole hand over me and the warmth
of his hand is nice and I fit perfectly in his palm and he doesn’t look like he’s
making fun of me. He looks serious. Even when he looks back at his friends, Carl Drier
and Michael Cox, and I look too, they don’t look like they’re making fun of me.

I stop narrating and look out the window. I like the warmth of his hand and the way
I fit in his palm and the way he’s slowly spreading his fingers. We sit there, me
looking out the window and him with his hand over my shirt, looking back at his friends.
We sit there for what seems like a really long time. Then he lifts up the bottom of
my T-shirt and puts his hand underneath against my bare skin. He covers my pointy
breast with his palm, bra and all. It doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever felt before.
I feel thirsty and now I can’t look at Desmond or his friends, because his hand’s
under my shirt and I wonder if anyone else sees.

The bus slows down. It’s my stop. “This is my stop,” I say and my voice sounds strange.
Desmond takes his hand away and I grab my backpack and Desmond says, “Bye Anna,” and
the other kids turn around to look because they’ve never heard him say my name before.

“See you tomorrow,” he calls.

But tomorrow Nancy doesn’t have dance class, so we go to her house and we choreograph
a dance to a song her sister likes and I spend all day waiting to tell her about Desmond’s
hand but then I don’t.

*   *   *

At lunch the next day Desmond stops and says hello to Nancy and me.

“I didn’t know you knew him,” Nancy says and I flush. My face is warm. Now I’m the
type of girl boys notice, I think. And I feel a little superior to Nancy then.

That afternoon it’s raining and all the kids run from the front door of the school
to the idling bus. I have my backpack over both shoulders and I’m wearing my best
blue jacket and my favorite jeans that look like the jeans that all the other girls
wear. Desmond gets on after me and stops in the aisle next to my seat. His hair’s
wet and in his eyes and I feel flushed and excited when he looks at me.

“Can I sit here?” he says and he doesn’t wait for an answer but sits down next to
me on the small seat and after him Michael Cox and Carl Drier fall into the seat in
front of us.

I can picture what it’s going to be like for me now, what it’s going to be like, how
he’ll introduce me to his friends and how he’ll invite me to parties at Lisa Jenner’s
house and how I’ll invite Nancy along and when they ask who invited her, I’ll say
I did.