Uses for Boys (6 page)

“He said you smell good?” I ask. I know when to ask a question or repeat what she
says because she pauses, looks out at the rhododendrons and sighs. The day after they
met he picked her up in his car and took her to his apartment. She wore her favorite
dress, the one with the thin brown-and-green stripes, and a denim jacket.

“That jacket,” she says, pointing to the one I’ve pulled over me. She’d taken a shower
and shaved her legs and shaved under her arms and scrubbed between her legs, so she
was cleaner than clean. But all he wanted to do was play music and read to her, smell
the part of her neck under her chin and put his hands up under her hair.

“He didn’t even want to kiss,” she says. He liked it, she says, when she smelled him.
So she leaned in, first behind his ear and then against the soft cotton of his T-shirt.
She laid her cheek against his chest and waited, bent and awkward on the low couch.
They laced their fingers together.

She stops talking, looks out at the rhododendrons and sighs. But I don’t know what
to say. I stare at the brown and rotting blooms.

“Did he smell good?” I ask. They had many dates like that. Sitting quietly together
and smelling each other. She was falling in love, Toy says, and this is what it’s
like. Every morning she showered, shaved and was ready. Just in case. Ready for her
first time.

“I was ready,” she says.

I think about Joey. It wasn’t like that. It happened in degrees. But I found that
once you did those things with a boy there was no going back.

“What do you mean, no going back?” she asks.

“You know, to sniffing,” I say, but she doesn’t think that’s funny.

Toy’s mom comes out through the sliding glass door and I know she’s been sleeping
because her eyes are puffy and there are pillow lines on her face. She isn’t anything
like my mom who never sleeps in the daytime. She asks if we’re hungry and then goes
inside to get a twenty-dollar bill for pizza. They eat a lot of pizza.

Seth wanted the first time to be special. They spent long afternoons talking about
it and he whispered a litany of all the things he’d do to her and all the things she’d
feel and all the things he already feels, just thinking about it. They graduated from
the couch to his mattress and laid there, fully clothed, talking about it. He didn’t
even touch her.

“He didn’t touch you?” I ask. I don’t understand. Boys want to touch you. They want
to stuff their hands up your shirt or down your pants. They want you to touch them.
Boys say things like, “See how hard you make me?” And “Can’t you feel how much I want
you?”

“Didn’t he want to?” I ask.

“He wanted it to be special,” she said. So they made a date. A date to make love.

“Make love?” I say, but she just slants her eyes at me and maybe, I think, maybe I
don’t know anything.

We’ve moved inside. She’s lying on the bed and I’m trying on her dresses in front
of the full-length mirror. I like staring into my own eyes and wondering what I’m
thinking. Sometimes my eyes tell me nothing, like I’m impenetrable.

“His apartment smelled like incense and the lights were really low.” Toy’s rushing
now because she thinks she’s lost my attention. We’ve already eaten the pizza and
smoked some pot. Seth told her it was important that everything be done right.

I think about Todd’s hand on my mouth. I’m tired of my own knocking thoughts about
boys. Seth took off Toy’s dress and made her lie in front of him in her bra and underwear.
He stroked her body with the tips of his fingers, then took off her underwear, parted
her legs and licked her.

“He ate you out?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she says, and I think again, maybe I just don’t know.

“He made me,” she says, “ready.”

Seth made her ready and then stood over her taking off his own clothes. He played
her favorite music and made her breathe with him when he put himself inside her. I’ve
never heard of a special kind of breathing, but Toy seems very certain. She says that
he had a vase of flowers on each side of the bed and during, she rolled her head back
and forth, looking from one to another. And she says that it hurt, but I say that’s
an old wives’ tale because it hadn’t hurt me at all. But she says it did.

“It hurt a lot,” she says.

my story

I tell Toy about Joey. I tell her about the ways we fit together. I was alone and
then I found Joey, I say. “It was love,” I say.

Toy says, “Seth too. Love.”

Then I tell her about Todd. The story I’ve been telling myself. “He wanted to kiss
me,” I say. “We had sex, but it was a secret.”

And Toy tells me about Seth, about how he kisses her so lightly it’s more like the
thought of a kiss than a kiss and I’m not even sure I know what that means.

Todd never kissed me and now I’m stuck on that. Like a catch in the throat I can’t
get past. I can feel the sheets and the pillow under my head and the air hitting my
thighs when he pulled down the blanket. Toy is going on about Seth. How he kisses
the inside of her wrists. I’m dizzy from standing in two places at once, the night
at Delmi’s party and here, now, in Toy’s bedroom. I sit down and Toy walks over and
lifts my chin with her hand. I want to tell her everything. A different story.

“Toy,” I say and then I stop.

She’s looking at me as if tuning in a channel, clearing the static. I rest my chin
in her hand and look up. I think about her and Seth. How he must look at her. How
well he must know her.

I don’t tell Toy any other story. Instead I ask about Seth. It’s exhausting, this
not telling. I close my eyes. I can see the guest room in Delmi’s parents’ house.
I’m nauseous and the bed is spinning. I have to concentrate on breathing. I open my
eyes. I’m looking at Toy and thinking about Todd. I wonder if he ever thinks about
me.

tell-me-again times

I have to get out of the suburbs. I hold the idea so close, so tight, I could crush
it.

I’m in my own bed. I have bad dreams. I kick free of the sweaty sheets and look at
the pictures of girls I’ve ripped from magazines and pinned to my walls. One, faint,
is of a girl in the forest, her head resting against another who sits just out of
frame. I turn away, close my eyes, but the dream returns. I wake myself up and look
back. My mom, just a kid in a faded photograph, meets my gaze.

It’s the thin gray of morning and I strain to hear another person. I listen as though
I could hear the family next door beginning to move around, as though I could hear
my mom, wherever she is, waking.

I’m leaving, I think, and I feel better. I watch the light grow lighter.

“OK, then,” I say aloud. “I’m leaving.” I bury my head under the pillow and close
my eyes. I shove my hands under my hip bones and tell myself the story, our story,
my mom’s and mine. I tell it again. I lie still and then I sleep.

the camp counselor

Soon the bare walls are covered with pictures torn from magazines.

In one, two girls stand outside a medieval building in Paris and they’re smoking.
Their arms are hooked together in a “we’re French and good friends” kind of way. Their
long bangs almost cover their eyes and one wears a gauzy green skirt and a scarf over
her hair. The other has thick, oddly shaped bangle bracelets around her skinny wrists.
They’re laughing. They’re leaning together against the gray building.

I’m the girl in the green skirt. I’m French and my best friend is French and we smoke
and laugh at the boys. We drink coffee in the cafes. Our mothers are fashionable and
our fathers kiss us on both cheeks when they leave in the morning. The girl on the
right looks slantwise at the other, but the girl in the green skirt stares straight
out from under her bangs, right at the camera.

Toy is not French, but she’s angular and beautiful. We’re in the downstairs bathroom
and smoking pot out of a homemade bong that leaks. It leaks all over my jeans, so
I take them off and sit on the edge of the tub in my favorite underwear and my favorite
striped T-shirt and watch Toy line her eyes with black pencil. She wears a black vintage
dress because she loves Audrey Hepburn. I love Audrey Hepburn too and I’ve started
to wear ankle-length pants and striped shirts, like in
Funny Face,
but neither of us resemble Audrey Hepburn in any real way. We’re sixteen and Toy,
I’m noticing, is cracked and uneven looking, with sly eyes and bony elbows and a strange
little scar where her neck meets her collarbone. She had, I know, much worse stepfathers
than mine.

This dress is cotton, with a deep V in the back and a high square neckline. We found
it together at the dollar bins at Goodwill and after we washed it in her sink and
hung it in the shower to dry, we both tried it on. So we both own it, but mostly Toy
wears it. Sometimes we think that the perfect dress will change everything. Sometimes
I’m jealous of the way it looks on Toy, who has long legs that stick out from under
the dress like the legs of an elegantly carved table, even though hers are white and
won’t tan no matter how long she sits in her mother’s backyard.

I watch Toy who’s adding eye shadow on top of the pencil and heating up my curling
iron so she can make little forties waves in the hair around her face. I’m watching,
but I’m also holding my head aslant, chin down, looking up through my eyelashes and
sneaking peeks at how I look in the mirror. I tuck my hair behind my ears and imagine
myself with Toy’s boyfriend, Seth. I want him to think I’m beautiful, like how he
sees Toy. I want him to want something with me. Something real. He’ll take my face
in his hands or my hands in his hands and he’ll stand close and say my name.

“Anna,” he’ll say.

All of this I imagine while staring into my own eyes in the bathroom mirror. Toy is
talking and this is why I love her. She can go on about herself ceaselessly and like
the scratching of a branch against the window at night, the steady insistence of it
is comforting. She has stories without beginnings, stories that trail off, stories
that crisscross and contradict and dead end.

Toy is the star of her stories. Events orbit her like a constellation.

In this story she’s wearing the same dress that she’s wearing now. She’s waiting for
the bus to come to my house when her camp counselor from the third grade drives by.
It’s late and the air is cool. She’s without a sweater and watching the tiny bumps
on her arm appear and disappear and reappear, so she doesn’t notice when the camp
counselor pulls alongside her.

He rolls the window down, tips his head to one side and says, “I recognize you. You’re
Toy.”

And Toy says, “I recognize you, but I don’t know your name. I remember that year at
camp. I wore my favorite dress every day. It was red-and-white checkered with a white
placket in the front and yellow buttons. You said I should change if I wanted to play
soccer with the other girls.”

Toy looks at him as he idles by the bus stop in his faded blue car. Then she looks
away, high into the pine trees that shield them from the sky and then she looks back.

She decides he’s cute and she’s calculating in that way so she drops her voice a bit,
like a whisper that only he’s meant to hear and she says, “I didn’t want to play soccer
with the other girls.”

The camp counselor has vivid green eyes, dark brown curls, and the beginning of a
beard in that way we both agree is sexy. He’s wearing a Bauhaus T-shirt with blue
jeans and Converse sneakers and his car’s dirty, but in a college student kind of
way with books and magazines and papers. Best of all, the camp counselor has a guitar
case in the back, and in that way she has, Toy suggests that they go park by the lake
and play his guitar.

Now is Toy’s favorite part of the story. “It’s the dress,” she reprises. At an isolated
bus stop, cast in miniature against a background of dark green pines, in a black dress,
squinting at oncoming traffic, Toy is a skinny, third-grade girl all grown up. The
camp counselor takes her to the lake and teaches her chords on the guitar. Everything
glitters in the strong sunlight and when she closes her eyes and lies back against
the grass, she feels his hand brushing the side of her cheek. And when she opens her
eyes, he’s looking down at her with a kind of wonder. He kisses her in a way that’s
tender and full of promise.

Toy squints at me in the mirror. I’ve dropped my shoulders, straightened my back and
thrust my chest forward. I can feel the camp counselor’s hand on the side of my cheek.
My eyes are dropping closed and I can feel his breath next to my mouth. I put my hand
out on the countertop.

In the mirror Toy is working on her lipstick. With the chords the camp counselor taught
her, she says, she can play three new songs on the guitar.

mom’s boyfriends

“It’s nice you have a friend,” my mom says. She comes home like a tourist. She changes
her clothes and leaves. She doesn’t ask where I was or where I’m going or who I’m
with. She wants me to rinse the dishes before they go in the dishwasher. She wants
me to take off my shoes before I come in the house. Sometimes she brings a man home
and he waits in the kitchen while she changes her clothes. He’s an Anthony or a Glenn.

I’m polite. I stand with my hands by my side.

“Nice to meet you,” I say. We’re in the kitchen where Joey liked to take off my shirt
and kiss my chest. I’m making a bowl of cereal and Anthony is reaching out to shake
my hand.

“Nice to meet you,” I say again.

get out of the suburbs as fast as you can

Toy and I wear each other’s clothes. I wear hers and roll up the sleeves. She wears
mine and they look like doll’s clothes on her. We buy dresses and share them. We shop
at every thrift store in Portland. We take the bus to the east side, to the Salvation
Army on Hawthorne or the Goodwill on Division. We’re looking for the perfect dress,
the one that will transform us.