Don't Cry: Stories (6 page)

“She’s probably really religious, or maybe she’s crazy.” That’s what Sharon, the secretary, thought. “In this day and age? She was probably molested when she was little.”

“I don’t know” said Laura. “I respected it.”

Sharon shrugged. “It takes all kinds.”

She imagined her father looking at the middle-aged virgin and then looking away with an embarrassed smile on his face. He m ight think about protecting her, about waving at her from across the street, saying, "Hi, how are you?” sending protection with his words. He could protect her and still keep walking, smiling to himself with embarrassed tenderness. He would have a feeling of honor and frailty, but there would be something sad in it, too,

because she wasn’t young. Laura remembered a minor incident in a novel she had read by a French writer, in which a teenage boy knocked an old nun off a bridge. Her habit was heavy and so she drowned, and the writer wondered, with a stupid sort of meanness, Laura thought, if the nun had felt shocked to have her genitals touched by the cold water. She remembered a recent news story about a nut job who had kidnapped a little girl so that he could tie her to a tree and set a fire around the tree. Then he went to his house to watch through binoculars as she burned. Fortunately, a neighbor called the police and they got there in time.

Instead of going back to the waiting room, she went to the public bathroom and leaned against the small windowsill with her head in her hands. She was forty, she tried to imagine what it would be like to be a virgin. She imagined walking through the supermarket, encased in an invisible membrane that was fluid but also impenetrable, her eyes wide and staring like a doll’s. Then she imagined her virginity like a strong muscle between her legs, making all her other muscles strong, making everything in her extra alive, all the way up through her brain and into her bones.

She lifted her head and looked out the small window. She saw green grass and the tops of trees, cylindrical apartment buildings and traffic. She had not wanted her virginity. She’d had to lose it with three separate people; her hymen had been stubborn and hard to break.

She brushed the dust and particles from the windowsill off her elbows. “I was a rebellious girl,” she said, “and I went in a stupid direction.”

She thought of the Narcotics Anonymous meetings she had attended some years ago. People talked about the things that had happened to them, the things they had done on drugs. Nothing was too degrading or too pathetic or too dull. Laura had talked about trying to lose her virginity. Her friend Danielle had told a story about how she’d let a disgusting fat guy whom she hated try to shove a can of root beer up her vagina because, he’d suggested, they might be able to fill cans with heroin and smuggle them.

Laura smiled a little. After the meeting, she’d asked Danielle, “Who tried to stick it in, you or him?”

"Oh,” said Danielle, “we both tried.” They laughed.

Such grotesque humility; such strange comfort. She remembered the paper plates of cookies, the pot of coffee at the low table in the back of the room at NA. She loved standing back there with Danielle, eating windmill cookies and smoking. Laura looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. “A stupid girl,” she said to her reflection.

Well, but who could blame her? When she was still a teenager, out of nowhere her mother asked Laura what it had been like to lose her virginity. She wanted to know if the experience had been “special.” It was late and the living room was dark. They had been watching TV together. Laura was startled by the question. “Was it someone you loved?” asked her mother.

“Yes,” replied Laura, lying. “Yes, it was.”

“I’m glad,” said her mother. She still looked straight ahead. "I wanted you to have that.”

What a revolting conversation, thought Laura. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why; her mother had only been expressing concern. But her concern seemed somehow connected with the nun in the water, and the dirtbag trying to set the little girl on fire.

She went back to the waiting room and got the grouchy middle-aged man. He didn’t bother to take off his shoes when he weighed himself. He was there, he said, only because his wife had made him come. He had taken off from work and shot the whole day. “My wife loves going to the doctor,” he said. "She had all those mammograms and she lost her breast anyway. Most of it.”

"Well, but it’s good to come in,” said Laura. "Even if it doesn’t always work. You know that. Your wife’s just caring about you.”

He gave a conciliatory snort. With his shirt off, he was big and flabby, but he carried it as if he liked it. His blood pressure was much too high. Laura let her touch linger on him as she worked because she wanted to soothe him.

When the man was gone, she asked Dr. Phillips if she could go outside on her break. He usually didn’t like her to do that because she was always a little late getting back when she went out, but he was trying to be extra nice since her father died. “Okay,” he said, “but watch the time.” He turned and strode down the hall, habitually bristling, like a small dog with a dominant nature.

Outside, the heat was horrible. She started sweating right away, probably ruining her uniform for the next day. Still, she was glad to be out of the building. The clinic was located between a busy main street and a run-down little street occupied by an old wig shop, a children’s karate gym, and a large ill-kept park where aging homeless men sat around. She decided to walk a few blocks down the park street. She liked the trees and she was friendly with a few of the men, who sometimes wished her good afternoon.

She walked and an old song played in her head. It was the kind of old song that sounded innocent and dirty at the same time. The music was simple and shallow except for one deep spot where it was like somebody’s pants were being pulled down. “You got nothin’ to hide and everybody knows it’s true. Too bad, little girl, it’s all over for you.” The singer laughed and the music laughed, too, and the laughter was spangled all over with sexiness.

Laura had loved the song; she had loved the thought of it being

all over and everybody knowing. A lot of other people must’ve loved it, too; it had been a very popular song. She remembered walking down the hall in high school wearing tight clothes; boys laughed and grabbed their crotches. They all said she’d sucked their dicks, but really she’d only screwed one of them. It didn’t matter. When her father found out, he yelled and hit her.

“Was it someone special?” her mother had asked. “Was it someone you loVed?”

She stopped at a curb for traffic. Her body was alive with feelings that were strong but that seemed broken or incomplete, and she felt too weak to hold them.

A car pulled up beside her, throwing off motor heat. The car was full of loud teenage boys. The driver, a Hispanic boy of about eighteen, wanted to make a right turn, but he was blocked by a stalled car in front of him and cars on his side. He was banging his horn and yelling out the window; his urgency was hot and all over the place. Laura stared at him. His delicate beauty was almost too bright; he had so much light that it burned him up inside and made him dark. He yelled and pounded the horn, trying to spew it out, but still it surged through him. It was like he was ready to kill someone, anyone, without any understanding in his mind or heart. That thought folded over unexpectedly; Laura pictured him as a baby with his mouth on his mother’s breast. She pictured his fierce nature deep inside him, like dark, beautiful seeds feeding off his mother’s milk, off the feel of her hand on his skull. She thought of him as a teenager with a girl; he would kiss her too hard and be rough, wanting her to feel what he had inside him, wanting her to see it. And, in spite of his roughness, she would.

He turned in his seat to shout something to the other boys in the car, then turned forward again to put his head out the window to curse the other cars. He turned again and saw Laura staring at

him. Their eyes met. She thought of her father showing his aunts the stars and all the planets. You are good, she thought. What you have is good. The boy dropped his eyes in confusion. There was a yell from the backseat. The stalled car leaped forward. The boy snapped around, hit the gas, and was off.

Laura crossed the street. How to explain that? she thought How to know what it even was? She thought, I told him he was good. I told him with my eyes and he heard me.

Well, tonight she’d call Danielle and tell her about it; Danielle had a lot of strange emotional moments with, say, a lady standing in the prescription line next to her at the drugstore, or a guy in the car behind her who’d yelled at her because she couldn’t figure out the parking gate right away. Except it probably wouldn’t seem like a story by the time the day was over.

She walked up the block sweating, feeling so replete and grateful that she wondered if she was crazy She pictured the middle-aged virgin, this time at home at night, doing her meticulous toilet, rubbing her feet with softening cream. She pictured herself at home, curled on the couch, watching TV and eating ice cream out of the carton. She pictured the men in her dream, fighting. She pictured herself kneeling to hold the handsome man’s cut-open head. She would pass her hand over his broken skull and make an impenetrable membrane grow over his exposed brain. The membrane would be transparent, and you would be able to see his brain glowing inside it like magic stones. But you could never cut it or harm it.

She pictured her father, young and strong, smiling at her, the planets all around him. She thought, I love you, Daddy.

She saw the homeless men moving about deep in the park, their figures nearly obscured by overgrown grasses and trees. For a moment, she strained to see them more clearly, then gave up. It was time to go back. She was late, but it would be okay, probably.

A feminist author came to talk at the annual literary festival in Toronto, one of the good-looking types with expensive clothes who look younger than they are (which is irritating, even though it shouldn’t be), the kind of person who plays with her hair when she talks, who always seems to be asking you to like her. She was like that, but she had something else, too, and it was that “something else” quality that made what she did so peculiarly aggravating.

Before I go any further, it must be said that I arrived at the festival tense and already prone to aggravation. I have been divorced for five years. I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl. My ex-husband is stalwart in his child-support payments, but he is a housepainter who is trying to be an artist, and out of respect for his dreams, his payments are not large. We met in graduate school, where I was studying creative writing, a dream-cum-memory rolling monotonously near the bottom of the subthought ocean. After years of writing in-brief book reviews, plus fact-checking and proofreading for an online magazine, I have recently begun writing full-length reviews (which means a little more money and a lot less time for playing “The Mighty Michelle” with Kira); for the first time, I have been assigned to do something light and funny on the social scene at the literary festival. The idea of proximity to so many actual authors may ve caused some more intense than usual subthought rolling, which is perhaps why a fight with my daughter got nastier than it had to this morning. It did not help that it was a fight about whether or not she can, at ten, bleach her hair “like Gwen Stefani,” and that the fight then had to turn into a discussion with Tom about how he had to be sure that while staying with him this afternoon, she did not somehow get hold of boxed bleach and take charge of the bathroom. Or, furthermore, that she not be allowed to persuade him that red might be okay if blond was not.

Still, for the most part, I was able to clear my mind of all this once I arrived at the festival. Writers from all over the world were there, people from Somalia, Greece, Israel, the United States, Italy, and Britain. There were writers who’d been forced to flee their countries, writers from police states, writers from places where everybody was starving; writers who wrote about the daily prob' lems of ordinary people, the obscenity of politics and the pain of the lower classes, glamorous writers who wrote about the exciting torment of the fashionable classes. Writers with airs of gravity or triviality, well-heeled or wearing suits they had probably rented for this event, standing at the bar with an air of hard-won triumph, or simply looking with childish delight at all the glowing bottles of delicious drinks and trays of foodstuffs. I glimpsed a smart blond woman on the arm of a popular author and fleetingly thought of my daughter: If she could see me here, she would feel curiosity and admiration.

But getting back to the “feminist author”; it is not really right to call her that, as she was not the only feminist there, as, in fact, her presence may have annoyed other, more serious feminists. She was a feminist who had apparently been a prostitute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prostitutes as fighters against the patriarchy. She would say stupid things like that, but then she would write some good sentences that

would make people say, “Wow, she’s kind of intelligent!” Some people may’ve said she should not have been at the festival at all, but why not? An event such as this is dazzling partly in its variety; it is a social blaze of litde heads rolling by in a ball of light, and all the heads have something to say: “No one should ever write about the Holocaust again!” “Irony is ruining our culture!” Or in the case of the feminist ex-prostitute, “Women can enjoy sexual violence, too!” Well. I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the balls of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and her arms flexed combatively, head cocked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount. An image you could look at and go, Okay, now for the author who says, “We live in an entertainment society and it’s terrible!”

She was reading with two other people, a beautiful seventeen-year-old Vietnamese girl who wrote about rapes and massacres, and a middle-aged Canadian who wrote touching stories about his daughters. First the Vietnamese girl read about a massacre, then came the feminist writer She immediately began complaining, but she did it in a way that made her complaint sound like a special treat we might like to have. Her voice was sweet, with a sparkling rhythm that made you imagine some shy and secret thing was being gradually revealed. I felt caught off guard; she wore a full-length skirt and litde glasses and round-toed clog-style boots.