Uses for Boys (5 page)

I pull my arms away and cover my ears so I don’t have to hear his ragged breath. I
close my eyes so tight it hurts. He takes his hand off my mouth and wipes himself
on the sheet. I think he’s going to kiss me but I have vomit on my face. He doesn’t.
He’s going to say something. My eyes are closed but I loosen my hands over my ears.
He pushes off the bed and stands up.

“Don’t tell anyone,” he says.

secret

I’m in the hot backseat, driving back to Portland with my mom and her boyfriend. The
boyfriend’s driving and the back of his head curves over the front seat like a rising
planet. He has a full head of hair. The first stepfather was balding and the second,
thinning, so, in terms of hair, my mom’s moving up. Her own hair keeps getting lighter.
It’s so blond now, I can see right through it.

The boyfriend turns on the radio and sings along. He has a terrible voice. Even my
mom rolls her eyes. I tap her on the shoulder and point at the sign to
EATZ CAFE.
I have to go to the bathroom. The boyfriend’s hungry too, he says, and we pull over.

I’m wearing the same shorts as the night at Delmi’s, but with a baggy T-shirt and
moccasins. I wear the moccasins every day now. There’s a bruise on my thigh that the
shorts don’t cover. I didn’t tell Delmi.

“Did he come back?” she said when I saw her the next morning.

“He tried to kiss me,” I started and already I’m telling the story and it’s changing
in the telling. In this version he liked me.

But she’s not listening and I never have a chance to tell the story, even to myself.
And so I don’t tell anyone. I want Todd to know that. And then I am telling it to
myself. And in this version it’s our secret.

There’s a line for the bathroom and I’m behind a fat woman in shorts and dirty flip-flops.
She tugs at her ponytail with one hand and holds her son by the neck with the other.
She watches herself in the mirror. We’re all looking at ourselves, lined up in front
of the mirror. Ahead of her is a girl, younger than me and beautiful. Innocent. I
look at her, still thinking about Todd. Her long, long hair is braided in two dark
braids. The room smells of urine and lemon cleaner. There’s a high window where flies
enter and exit and for a long time the line hardly moves at all.

Back in the parking lot the sun glances off of the gas pumps and the E in
EATZ.
Cars flare and spark and I have to squint to make out my mom, leaning back against
the headrest in the front seat of our car. The window flashes to obscure her then,
as I get closer, frames her. She opens the door as I approach.

“Oh Anna,” she says. “I hate this drive.” She wears a lot of makeup, my mom, and sometimes
it’s all I can see when I look at her. There are little cracks in the surface under
her eyes and a greasy line of shadow in the fold of her eyelid.

There was this boy, I want to say. I want to tell her about Todd and I want her to
fold me up in her arms. I want her to know. But I don’t tell her. I don’t know which
story to tell.

She looks at me. I’m standing right in front of her, in the open car door, with my
eyes telling her what happened. I’m looking directly at her and my eyes are telling
her everything. How he pulled down the blanket and pulled down the sheet. What happened
after. How I waited there until morning, my knees pressed against the wall, listening.
Wondering if he was going to come back. She looks right at me with all of her attention.
Her eyes open wide and then narrow again. The blush and the mascara and the powder
all soften together.

“How is the bathroom,” she says. “Is it clean?”

toy

When we get back to the suburbs, I cut the arms off my twill shirts and wear them
over the T-shirt that the stepbrother left behind. I cut my own bangs. I spend a long
time looking at myself in the mirror in the downstairs bathroom. It’s windowless and
dark and the fluorescent lights make heavy shadows under my eyes. If Joey were still
here he’d put his face next to mine, his cheek against my cheek and meet my eyes in
the reflection. I listen for the garage door, but my mom doesn’t come home. She leaves
for two days with a note on the table. Then she comes back. Then she leaves for a
week.

I go to Goodwill. It’s the size of a hospital, brightly lit and nearly empty. I’m
wearing the stepbrother’s jeans rolled up and Converse. A tight plaid shirt from when
I was little. I’m looking for something. The perfect clothes. A uniform for the girl
I want to be. I run my hands over the racks and then move to the far corner of the
store. I’m methodical. Kids’ clothes first, looking for shrunken blazers and thin
faded T-shirts. Then to women’s. Leotards, vintage bathing suits, high-waisted shorts.
I try things on in the aisles. I look in the mirror and imagine. Am I this girl? Am
I this one? I look through the scarves. Buckets of silky ones and chiffon ones. I’m
looking for the tourist ones, the monuments of Washington, D.C. or the Leaning Tower
of Pisa.

I find a T-shirt from the Mystery Spot. I find a scarf from the rock of Gibraltar.
I’m hesitating over a pair of clogs when I see them. Perfect and perfectly small brown
wingtips. Men’s, but they look small enough to fit.

I put the clogs down and step forward. There’s a girl my age hunched over like she’s
too tall or the light is too bright, wearing a long black dress from the seventies
with a T-shirt underneath and she’s walking right over to the shoes. She picks one
up and looks down at it in her hands.

I don’t think she sees me. There’s music playing over the loudspeaker and an employee
nearby straightening sweaters. I’m standing in front of the clogs and holding my T-shirt
and scarf in one hand.

And then she says, “They’re too small for me,” like she knows I’m there. Like she
sees me. I take a step closer but I don’t say anything. She stares at the shoe in
her hand.

I look at her and I look at the shoe. I look down at the floor and then I look around.
“They might fit me,” I say quietly.

The girl holds out the shoe. I step closer again and rest the T-shirt and scarf on
a shelf. I take the shoe from her and turn it over in my hand. She’s still looking
at the ground, but I can tell her eyes are looking around. She has a narrow face.
Narrow eyes. Her dress is thin and stretchy and I can see her hip bones. Her breasts
are even smaller than mine. She’s wearing high-heeled sandals and her hair is thick
and long and straight like a child’s. She’s beautiful. She’s beautiful and I want
to know her.

Toy tells me every great thing she’s ever found at Goodwill. She tells me about this
dress, the black dress and the other dresses, a rainbow of dresses that she’s found
here. She looks at the ground when she talks and her eyes slant and dart over to mine
and then back. I sit down on a bench and take off my sneakers. The wingtips fit and
they’re perfect. I look at Toy and Toy’s looking at my feet and she says it too. Perfect.
Just like that.

“They’re perfect,” she says and then she sits down and takes my scarf off the shelf
in front of us.

“I saw this,” she says. “I wish I’d taken it.” She’s holding it up to the light and
the gray cliff of Gibraltar is neatly in the center. “It’s cool,” she says.

I reach for the coveted scarf. “I’ll loan it to you,” I say and I hold my feet out
in front of me admiring the shoes.

Toy and I shop together. There are a pair of sailor pants with a boy’s name embroidered
on the inside. There’s a bright blue mohair cardigan. We stand in front of the mirror
and try things on. I dip my chin so my bangs fall forward and I look at her eyes in
the mirror but she looks only at herself. She puts a dress on over the one she’s wearing,
twists her hair up and holds it on top of her head. The she turns to me.

“What do you think,” she says. And then she says, “My boyfriend would love this.”
And she emphasizes the word, love. “He would love this,” she says. And she emphasizes
the word, boyfriend. “My boyfriend,” she says.

I look at myself in the mirror and dip my chin. She has a boyfriend, I think.

After we had sex the first time, Joey took the condom off and placed it next to the
bed. “I’m your boyfriend now, you know,” he’d said and when he said that, I made fists
and filled his armpits. Stretched out the fingers of my hand and compared them to
his. I think about Todd. His hand over my mouth. Toy turns around in the mirror.

“He would love this,” she says again, pulling the short black dress off again.

In the end I let her buy the scarf and she buys the short black dress and I buy the
wingtips and the sailor pants and the T-shirt from the Mystery Spot. We each buy a
few old
Vogue
magazines. We stand on the sidewalk and I hold our bags while Toy reapplies her lipstick.
She does it without a mirror and when she’s done, she looks up at the pregnant sky,
heavy with clouds. I’m holding her bag in my hand and feeling like she could just
walk away at any second and nothing will have changed.

I need something to change. I look up at the sky and try to figure out what to say.
Toy stretches and then yawns.

“Let’s go to my house,” she says. And then she takes her bag and walks toward the
bus stop.

best friends

The bus winds through the city and out to Toy’s neighborhood on the other side of
the suburb from mine. She’s talking about her family.

“From daughter to wife,” is how she describes her mom, as if repeating something she’d
heard. “He left us” is how she describes her dad. “The stepfathers,” she says, “aren’t
worth describing.”

“From stepfather to stepfather,” I say.

“Me too,” she says. And now her father has new kids. “Better kids,” she says. “His
finally-got-it-right family.”

I stare at her profile.

“I’m the fucked-up daughter with the fucked-up mother,” she says. “A leftover from
his practice family.”

My arms circle the bag on my lap. Toy has a story about everyone. I never met my dad.
I don’t know if he has another family.

Toy’s father takes her to dinner once a month. The first Saturday of every month.
As seldom as possible. “He hates to even look at me,” she says. “I remind him of my
mom.” She pauses, lifting her chin. “She’s beautiful,” she says.

Her dad, she says, takes her out and watches her eat. He asks her about school. Then
takes her home. He pulls away from the curb before she gets to the front door.

Toy lives on a cul-de-sac just like I do and her house looks like my house, except
all the furniture is white, all the mirrors have gold frames and her mom is home.

We’re the same age, we slump the same way in all our school pictures, have endured
all of the same hairstyles. There are empty rooms that the stepfather and stepbrother
left behind, just like at my house. We could switch places, I think, like in a movie.
She’s still talking and I stare at her thin ankles, her scuffed shoes. Toy looks like
me in that way where she doesn’t at all. Not on the outside.

*   *   *

Everything changes. First there was my mom and then there was Joey and now there’s
Toy and in this story I’m not alone. She lets me curl her hair around my fingers.
She lets me wear her favorite shirt and roll up the sleeves.

She says it first. “You’re my best friend,” she says and I feel something when she
says it. I feel it in the tip of my fingers, under my fingernails and in the palms
of my hand. I feel something so strong and so familiar that I want to take it home
and show my mom. See, I want to say. I want to hold out my hands and show my mom so
she can see it and remember.

I sit on the side of the tub and watch Toy get ready. She twists her hair up and catches
it on top of her head. She curls her eyelashes, tints her cheeks. Pieces of dark hair
escape from her barrette. I look at my own reflection, jagged hair and blue eyes.
I want to be Toy. I want to climb into her and feel the ticking spiral of her thoughts
in my head. But more than that, I want her to feel it too. I want her to want to be
me.

toy’s story

It’s late afternoon and we’re sitting on the weathered lounge chairs in her mother’s
backyard next to an empty pool.

“After the divorce,” she says. After the divorce their pool was emptied and never
refilled. I’m flipping through an old
Vogue
and pointing out things I would wear and things I never would.

But back when the pool was full, Toy’s saying, before the divorce, Toy’s stepbrother
had a party and Seth was there. “That was it,” Toy says. “Right away I knew,” and
she stares off into the rhododendrons. Toy’s my best friend now and we wear each other’s
clothes. We memorize the bus schedule between her house and mine. Seth, I know, is
her boyfriend. I’ve never met him. He’s older and a friend of Toy’s stepbrother.

That reminds me. “What do you call a stepbrother after the divorce?” I ask. I think
there should be a name for this.

Toy ignores me. “He had the greenest eyes you ever saw,” she says. Her sentences always
turn up at the end. There was chemistry between them, she says, and chemistry, I’m
made to understand, is crucial. “It’s about how you smell. Not how you smell smell,
but how you smell to him.” She’s looking right at me to make sure I understand, so
I smell myself and lift my shoulders in a shrug.

I’m wearing oversized shorts and a thin white T-shirt. I wear my brown wingtips without
socks. I rub my hands over my calves. It really isn’t all that warm and when a cloud
passes in front of the sun, it isn’t warm at all. I pull a denim jacket over my chest.

“Everyone else ignored me,” she says. “But Seth came right up and put his nose against
my neck and said that I smell good.” He was always smelling her, she says. She was
a virgin when they met and now she says the best thing about sex is all the sniffing
and smelling. I think she must be joking about that.