Uses for Boys (9 page)

I put sixteen dollars in the pocket of my coat and tuck thirty in an envelope that
I keep in the bottom drawer of Josh’s dresser. I put the envelope away and close the
drawer. Then I open it again. I pull out the envelope and count the money. Four hundred
and twenty-eight dollars in bills, all facing the same way. I put it back in the envelope,
back in the drawer, and go out to look for him.

There’s a fresh wind outside and I don’t have a scarf. I hold the collar of my coat
closed around my neck and look both ways when I leave the apartment. Under a coffee-colored
sky, the block is empty. A streetlamp flickers and goes out and I think of Toy. Josh
isn’t at the bar so I walk on, but he isn’t at the coffee shop either.

When I get back he’s at the apartment, sitting on the floor by the mustard-colored
lamp, looking blank. He looks like that more often lately, like an object out of place,
or maybe I’m the object out of place, or maybe he’s always looked like that and I’m
just now noticing.

The apartment unfolds in the dim light. The unmade bed is peaked and stormy, the sheets
I brought are now as dingy as everything else.

I know he’s tired. I know he’s worked all day. His face is freckled with paint and
he has clumps of it in his hair. I sit next to him so I don’t block the space heater
and I begin to untie his boots. The laces are long and broken and mended in little
knots. I untie each one in turn and loosen the tongue. His socks are bunched painfully
beneath. I open his boots and pull them off, smooth his socks over thin ankles and
hold the feet together, whispering, “Poor feet, poor feet,” into the arch of each
one.

He stiffens. He’s self-conscious about his feet. But I hold them tight under the arch
until he relaxes, pulls his knees to his chest and closes his eyes. I feel that I
can take care of him. I run my hands over his calves and knead the muscles. Then,
slowly so he doesn’t flinch, I take off his socks and run my palms over the soles
of his feet.

I want to take care of him. I pick the little balls of cotton from between his toes
and smooth the skin. I take off my own boots and socks and place our feet together
by the heater, unbutton my coat and push it to the floor. Josh reaches over and pulls
off my shirt, my stretchy bra, and pulls me, half undressed, on top of him. In the
light from the mustard-colored lamp, my skin is pale and my breasts are pointy. The
nipples are too large and I’m embarrassed by them. He’s holding me at arm’s length,
looking at my chest. My belly pudges out and my arms are childish, but he’s kissing
me and looking at me with eyes open or closed, and it doesn’t matter.

The part of me in front of the space heater is burning. The other parts retreat in
the cold air. His hands warm me, like hands petting a cat, but my skin chills as soon
as his touch leaves. He gets to his knees, picks me up like a child, and carries me
to our wintry, indifferent bed. He covers me with the dirty sheet and the big down
comforter and then he sits there, just watching me.

“I thought we were going to make love,” I say.

all of me

I stand in our bathroom trying to find my reflection. The dream is a low hum at the
edge of everything. The room is dim and the mirror is stained with rust, so even standing
as far back as I can, on my toes, I can only see a thin reflection. She doesn’t even
look like me.

I had no mother, I tell the wavering image. I had no father.

But nothing’s changed, the reflection replies.

Suddenly I want to go back to the suburbs and the pull is sharp and quick. Unexpected.
I have to get out of the apartment. I call my mom but she isn’t home and I’m not sure
if I’m disappointed or relieved.

It’s nearly midnight. There are four other girls on the bus, sprawled out in the back,
headed home after a night in the city with their heavy makeup and black clothes. They’re
maybe fourteen and they have a kind of happy kid–ness that shines through the sullen
facade. They giggle and then catch themselves and smirk. They’re girls, I think, so
their future is certain and I think about Toy. She has all these boys. All these boys
that think she’s beautiful. That give her things, but what’s the use? She’s still
afraid.

Afraid for her mom. Afraid she is her mom. What’s the use?

I watch the girls’ reflection in the dirty glass. We’re circling a long on-ramp headed
toward the freeway. I lean against the window and look out into the darkness.

In the suburbs, the streets are smaller and narrower than I remember. It’s only been
six months since I left, but already I’m out of place. Still, my key fits easily in
my mom’s lock and the door swings open. The house is hushed. I don’t know where I
belong. I push the dial on the thermostat, all the way up until I hear the rush of
the furnace.

With Josh’s eyes I notice the insistent cleanliness of everything. Nothing chipped
or worn. I leave the lights off and drop my bag. In the hall off the entry I slide
down a familiar wall until I’m sitting over a heating vent, the warm air rushes out
and I pull my T-shirt over my knees to catch it, just like I did when I was little.

I’m tired. Not because it’s late or because I worked today. Not because I made cappuccinos
and lattes and caffe americanos. Not because I slept in a tight ball on one side of
the bed since Josh started saying that I kick too much. Since he won’t sleep tangled
with me anymore. It’s a new tired.

I make a bowl of cereal and turn on the TV. I sit on one of the big chairs in the
living room and imagine my mom coming home. Finding me. I imagine what she’d say and
maybe she’d just be happy to have me back. I’m not back, but being here feels like
gravity. Weighty. Pulling at me. I turn off the TV and in the upstairs bathroom I
start a bath and take off all my clothes. Heavy and tired.

In the water I watch my feet emerge, disconnected in the far end of the tub. This
is me, I think, and I sit up suddenly, like a revelation. I hook my knees over the
edge, stare at the curve of my stomach, my bent legs, my feet and I think, this is
it. This is all of it. This is everything. And it’s not like waiting. And it’s not
like imagining. And it’s not like a story I tell myself. Maybe, I think, it’s not
boys. It’s not Josh. Or Joey. It’s not this empty house. Or Josh’s cold apartment.
I climb out of the tub and stand naked in front of my mom’s full-length mirror. All
I can hear is the furnace. This is all of me, I think, and I stretch out my arms like
a five-pointed star. I’m looking at my hair and how it’s grown, how my eyes are just
visible below my bangs. I’m looking at my hands and my elbows. I’m staring into my
own eyes and whatever it is, whatever it is that I want so badly, that thing that
Josh doesn’t understand, that my mom doesn’t see, maybe that’s all I need. The furnace
clicks off and I wrap myself in a large towel. I climb into my mom’s bed and burrow
under the clean sheets. I’ve left the milk out and in the morning it’s warm.

the next morning

I’m pregnant. I haven’t taken the test but I know.

My mom’s stories loop in my head. “All I wanted was a little girl,” she said. “And
then you came along and I had everything.”

But I’m not everything. I’m not even enough to keep her home.

I call Toy and she comes over. Her mom brings her to my mom’s house and when I go
to the curb to meet them, her mom calls me over to the car window. I lean down.

“Are you finally moving home?” she asks. She’s wearing a coat over her nightgown and
a scarf over her hair. Her eyes are fragile and red-rimmed.

“No,” I tell her. “I’m not,” I say and I trail off and we both look at the house.
But I try to be polite. I know that Toy’s mom doesn’t really see me. She’s like my
mom that way. My mom doesn’t really see Toy either.

Toy’s mom idles in the cul-de-sac in front of my mom’s house.

“Come on,” Toy says to me and I start to say more, but her mom squints at me through
the open window and I can tell she’s not listening. I step back and she pulls away
from the curb.

Toy takes me by the hand straight into the house, down the stairs to the room that
used to be the family room. Just like we used to. Even though there isn’t any furniture
down there anymore and the walls are covered with primer because my mom’s going to
redecorate, turn it back into a family room.

We collapse against one wall and Toy loads the soapstone pipe, gives the bowl and
the lighter to me and sucks in her breath.

“OK, tell me everything.”

There’s not much to tell. There were so many times when Josh just pulled out and came
on my stomach.

“I want to feel you,” he’d said.

“He did?” Toy says.

“They all say that,” I say. Doesn’t she know that? I tap the pot down with my finger
and light the edge. “I already called the clinic,” I tell her. “Four hundred bucks.”

“You think he’ll pay?”

“Half, I think,” and I think he will.

Toy holds my hand. She’s always at her best when I’m at my worst. We sit with our
backs against the wall, my hand in hers, looking out the sliding glass door at the
damp grass. The yard has begun to bloom with spring flowers. The room is cold because
the vents are closed and I can see all the spots on the carpet where Toy and I spilled
candle wax staying up late and smoking pot and talking.

“Strange in here now,” says Toy.

“Yeah,” I say and I pack my bag and we wait for the bus to go back downtown.

jane

Three days later I’m in the Women’s Health Center talking to a woman named Jane. She’s
pregnant. The woman at the abortion clinic is pregnant and I save the irony to share
with Toy. I tell Jane about my breasts, how they’re swollen and sore. How I’m nauseous.
She tells me a trick: if I eat saltines before I even lift my head from the pillow,
I won’t throw up. As soon as I leave the clinic I’ll buy some saltines.

Jane has clean, freckled skin and warm pudgy hands. I think she would reach over and
pat me on the arm if it looked like I needed that. She has large pregnant breasts
and her thick cotton T-shirt pulls around her stomach. I can see the outline of her
belly button. She wants to know how I got pregnant. How I feel about the pregnancy.
If I’ve told the boy, if I’ve told my mom, if I’ve thought about keeping the baby.

“No,” I say. Her eyes scan my face and when I tell her about Josh, she tips her head
and gives me a sympathetic nod. I tell her about the cold apartment. My dim reflection
in the bathroom mirror. She would spend hours talking to me, I think. We’d stay here
until I ran out of things to say. I tell her things. I think about Todd and the night
at Delmi’s house and I almost tell her, but then I don’t.

“Have you ever had an abortion?” I ask.

“I was a little older than you,” she says. And she tells me how angry her parents
were. How her mom cried. Now, she says, she’s thirty-three. She’s been married for
three years.

“And soon,” she says, with her hand on her stomach, “there will be three of us.”

When I look at her, tracing the spots on her cheek where the freckles all run together,
I think maybe she’s the first happy woman I’ve ever met.

We talk about names for the baby.

“Anna’s a pretty name,” she says. She’s having a girl.

The room has anatomically correct drawings of the female reproductive system on the
wall and no windows. I take a plastic replica of a pelvis from the desk and turn it
over and over in my hands.

“Do you usually use condoms?” she asks. “How many sexual partners have you had?”

Jane doesn’t judge. “You’re not supposed to judge,” I say like it’s a statement. And
she’s surprised that I live with Josh. She asks if I like it. If I miss school. But
school’s not what I miss.

“It’s not like I thought it would be,” I say, because it’s not. And then she asks
about my mom. She asks about my dad.

“I don’t know about fathers,” I say. I’ve been waiting to use that line. I’ve been
waiting for someone to ask. She laughs and I feel really happy. I’d wanted to make
her laugh. We’re laughing and, thinking about her daughter, I say, “You should name
her Joy.”

And she says, “Don’t you think that’s a little obvious?” And she says, “Wouldn’t it
be better to have a name with a little mystery?” and then she laughs again. “Are you
ready for a pelvic exam?” she says.

Josh is good about the four hundred dollars. He’s going to borrow the money from his
boss, he says, most of it. We meet at the bar and talk about it. He’s going to pay
most of it, he says and he says it again, “Most of it.” And then again.

“It’s my responsibility,” he says.

He holds his beer with both hands and his long fingers circle the glass. His hair
is long and littered with paint. He looks tired.

I didn’t tell Jane my mom’s story. I didn’t tell her that I’d made it mine. I have
no mother, I’d told Josh. I have no father. Then Josh came along and changed everything.
Now I was pregnant, but even I knew this wasn’t going to change anything.

Josh doesn’t ask about my story. He asks if I’m OK.

“I’m OK,” I say. And it’s true. That feeling from the night at my mom’s hasn’t gone
away. That view of myself: arms and legs and eyes steady in the mirror, that hasn’t
left me. All of me, I think. I still have that.

“I’m OK,” I say again.

He’s going to borrow a car to take me to the clinic. He’ll come in and stay while
it’s happening. The abortion, he says. “I’ll take you there and I’ll wait. I’ll be
there,” he says, “while you’re having the abortion.” He spins around on his bar seat.
He doesn’t ask any of the questions that Jane asked. He doesn’t ask how it happened.
He doesn’t ask if I want to keep it. He asks which day and when, how long will it
take.

“Are you scared?” he asks. And he pulls me off balance against his chest. He puts
his mouth against my ear and holds me, making noises, breathing, smashing my face
against his shirt. He smells dusty like dried paint and I pull away. I pull myself
back on the bar stool next to him. We spend the evening shooting pool and he makes
a big deal out of the shots I make.