Maidenhead (22 page)

Elijah looked towards the door. ‘Well, look who’s finally found her way back.’

I hoped that Gayl had her camera and was ready for something. But the lock was stuck, she started banging against the door. I ran over to open it for her.

‘Holy fuck! What happened to you?’

Gayl had two black eyes and a puffed-up mouth.

She pushed by me to Elijah in the bed. His arms opened and she curled up on his body like a cat.

‘I’ll get ice!’ I said.

The hallway stunk of smoke and beer. Ice would bring that swelling down. My mother put ice on my face in the bathtub in Key West.

Gayl was crying and whispering to Elijah when I came back in with the bucket. She was in these tight black jeans with a short white leather jacket that showed her stomach. I’d never seen her so done up.

It didn’t occur to me then, holding the ice and watching her squirm on his lap, that he might have been the one who did that to her.

‘I don’t want that,’ Gayl said to me, her face in Elijah’s chest.

I put the ice bucket down on the floor.

‘I don’t like you, Myra,’ Gayl said. She kissed Elijah’s beard. She got up off his lap and lay down on the floor. She pulled her camera bag out from deep under the bed. Her lip was bleeding. ‘I think you look good on a screen, but I don’t like you.’

Gayl passed Elijah the video camera.

‘Why do you have to be so mean to me?’

Elijah started laughing. I knew I sounded like Jen, spoiled and naive:
Why don’t you like me? Why do you have to be so mean?

I couldn’t conclude my essay. I couldn’t bring it all together. I didn’t know how getting fucked a thousand times turned a slave free in Hegel’s dialectic.

It took me a second to realize that Elijah was filming, that Gayl was shimmying, puffy-eyed, towards me. Even barefoot, she was so much taller than me. I looked back at Elijah. The big black glass eye in front of his face. There are slaves on the earth right now. Gayl took off her white leather jacket.

‘Ready, E.? You ready for the first take?’

‘What is going on, you guys?’

Gayl slapped me across the head. Elijah shot it. I reached my hand up but she hit my other side hard.

‘Stop!’ I screamed.

Gayl didn’t stop. She looked back at Elijah and he circled in closer, climbing up on the bed. Gayl slapped my head for a third and fourth time.

‘I don’t like this,’ I was yelling. ‘Turn off that thing!’

‘It’s okay, Angel. Tell her, Gayl.’

Gayl concentrated. She didn’t speak. She was concentrating on performing, on pummelling me. I didn’t know why it was happening and I never stopped screaming, trying to grab at her hand before it smacked down.

‘Turn that off! Or I’m going to kill you!’

Gayl danced lighter on her feet. ‘Man, this is good.
She’s
going to kill
me
.’

Finally, I thought of something right to protect myself. I crouched down near the skirts of the bed, slid on my belly and hid my head in my arms. She couldn’t slap me like that. But Gayl kicked my sides in with her bare feet.

‘You getting this, ’Jah?’

Elijah grunted from up high.

‘Stop, please just stop it!’

‘You’re a little fucking baby who has been pampered all her life.’

Spit rained down on the back of my neck. She was winning the fight. It wasn’t a fight.

‘You listen to me, listen to this.’

‘Look up,’ Elijah ordered.

I would not look up. I would not fucking look up if they were going to do this to me. Slaves revolt. I remembered this.

‘Myra? Hey, Myra?’

I didn’t look up and the beating stopped.

‘Angel?’

‘Actress?’

‘Our beautiful bitch?’

Breathing, I slowly showed them an eye. Elijah hung over the edge of the bed with the camera. Gayl was a half-naked totem pole above me.

‘You’ve been living in a world of privilege and it’s made you crazy,’ Gayl said softly. ‘Look at her eye. Look at that innocent eye. You’re useless right now, baby. You need to grow up. You took a vacation on the backs of slaves. You and your family having fun like that. That is crazy. It is criminal. Stand up now. You can do it. Come on, stand up, baby. You’re strong, come on. You’re hurt, okay, but get up. Get this, Elijah. Come on, get her right now.’

I decided to obey. It would be easiest to obey her at this moment. It would be most useful to obey.

I felt my hands on the floor. I pushed up, then I stood there, exposed. Pounding rotated near my eyes. The camera beeped. Gayl was swaying, tall. Her fingers crunched and turned into a fist. The camera flashed. Gayl punched me in the jaw.

Oh god, Lee, please tell my father that I’m here! My family didn’t have fun on our vacation! My family split up on that vacation!

I focused on the bone in the middle of Gayl’s breasts to keep standing, to take it, her punch, her laugh. She saw where I was looking.

‘Check it out, Elijah. She’s different from the rest.’

I was starting to get it, even though I could barely see. I was being punched. I was equal with her now. I didn’t move my eyes from that bone in the middle of her body, her heart was somewhere under there. I was starting to get what was going on: I was being slapped and punched into being by a slapped and punched being. I needed to be cracked, the protection I was born with.

Elijah took the camera away from his face. ‘I think we got enough,’ he said.

‘She needs more,’ Gayl said, forcing me to focus. ‘This one needs more.’

Gayl stopped swaying. I was able to look at her face. It was beat-up and startling. We looked in each other’s eyes.

Gayl lifted her arm back in the air.

‘Do it,’ I heard coming out of my mouth. I was revolting.

Gayl smiled. I smiled. She opened her fist. She turned her hand around so I could see her cracked and raised knuckles. I lifted my chin up in the air. I could take her backwards slap. My whole world was changing.

‘This is it.’

The backwards blow made me split right in half. I saw the world how it was meant to be seen: broken and freaked, full of masters and slaves. Elijah and Gayl came from circumstances of hardship and I came from circumstances of ease. The knowledge of hardship is not as easily passed on as the knowledge of ease. Gayl had smacked me awake and the whole world could see.

Suddenly, I felt her arms around me. Hair and dread was all over my face. A body of sun came into the room through a crack in the drapes.

‘Get this for the end,’ I heard Gayl whisper to Elijah. She was hugging me, smoothing my hair. ‘I know this is different, E., but get this for the end.’

Our reconciliation would come across in the film: the snuff film of my consciousness.

LEE: God. I want to hold her. Fucking hell. It’s illegal. This is child porn.

GAYL: Child porn? Yeah? People do this all over the world.

LEE: You call yourself an artist?

GAYL: I am an artist.

LEE: You make child porn.

GAYL: Nah, come on, Lee. Use your brain. This is not child porn. You know it’s not that. Myra isn’t working. She sixteen. She knows she’s onstage.

LEE: She’s seventeen. So what?

GAYL: I make liberation porn. All my actors get that. They come to me for that. They follow me for that. You get it? It’s the opposite of child porn.

LEE: The opposite. What’s the fucking opposite of child porn?

GAYL: You just saw it. And check out all my work, lady: www.hotkentuckizianporn.com

§

My father staggered when he saw me. He went from dull eyes to abnormally sparked.

‘I’m fine.’ I stood at the doorway to the kitchen, hand up to fend him off. ‘I’m totally fine.’

A woman with a mop in her arms stared too. It was Anna from Indonesia. Younger than my mother, no folds on her face.

‘Myra, I will go to the police, and if you think I won’t ...’

My father didn’t even know why he was saying the police, but my punched-out jaw and slapped cheeks must have made it seem to make sense. ‘Your face, Myra. Oh my god. What happened to you?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said again, softer. ‘My face heals quickly, remember? I promise that it’s fine.’

My father didn’t go down to the basement. He climbed up the stairs to my parents’ old room. I was still and so was Anna until we heard a door shut.

‘Come,’ Anna said from the corner of the kitchen.

I followed her to the side door of the pantry. She opened a large red leather bag. I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes. Anna didn’t say anything as she rubbed some kind of cream into my jaw that smelled like milk past its date.

Then she made me ginger tea, to bring down the swelling, she said. She was quiet and compact and kind.

When my father came back downstairs, I was drinking the tea and Anna was cleaning the counter.

‘Do you want to go visit your mother? We can put it on my points.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I said.

‘But it’s not working. This isn’t working.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘This. You’re having problems. We can all see that.’

My father was trying to formulate a plan.

‘So maybe you living here isn’t working anymore.’ His father’s voice caught. He looked over at Anna. It occurred to me that my father was looking to Anna for support. ‘I think you should try something else. Another school. You’re not attending.’

‘I am! I’m almost finished my final paper!’ It hurt my jaw to exclaim. ‘I just have to finish the conclusion, all right?’

Anna crouched down underneath the sink.

‘I still think you should go visit your mother. Myra, I don’t know what to do anymore.’

‘You know my mother’s staying at a love hotel, right?’

‘I’m not interested in that.’

‘She’s teaching businessmen how to read.’

‘Good. Good for her.’

‘She says that Asia is the new Europe and she’s going to backpack around Thailand and Indonesia for a while with her new friends. Maybe Anna has some pointers for her about the locals. She could probably use them. You’re from Indonesia, right, Anna?’

‘I said, Myra, we don’t want to know.’

‘We?’

My father put his face in his hands. He made a few half-coughing sounds.

There were pictures in photo albums stacked in our basement of my father holding all of us as babies, first Jody, then me, then Jeff. He held us all up in the air over his head and we flew. He looked happy in those pictures with his skinny arms straight up. He was able to make us laugh. I didn’t understand how that father was the same person as this one.

Anna held a yellow plastic bottle of dish cleaner in one hand. She went over to my father and handed him a tissue. My father looked at me, embarrassed. He took the tissue.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Anna.’

‘I’m not going to visit my mother,’ I said. ‘I mean, I don’t want to go.’

‘Okay,’ my dad said. ‘Then we’re going to the hospital.’

‘No!’ Anna yelled.

Anna looked at me straight. I looked at my father. I didn’t blame him that he thought he should take me to the hospital to find out what was going on. But it felt like Anna understood where I got my beat-up face: in a learning position.