Maidenhead (4 page)

That guy’s low voice, hunched over, his poking-out cock.
Little bitch. Come back, little bitch.

I got up from the table. The music popped. I passed by Jody at the payphone on the way to the bathroom. She was probably talking to her boyfriend back at home.
Little bitch.
I pushed into a toilet stall. I didn’t even make it to lock the door. I was all wet.
Come back, little bitch.
My finger felt up me. I leaned into the door. There were scratches on the walls. That guy wanted to have sex. He pissed on my back.
Little bitch. Come back.
I was rubbing myself. My pink bathing suit with the holes in the sides. It just took a second, I heard him calling me back.
Bitch! Come back, little bitch ...
A thing unfolded and surged up inside me, as if a kite flying was exploding into flames. The stall door banged. My knees went hot. That was a real orgasm! I knew that it was! I couldn’t stand, I was shaking. The door helped me up. That was what an orgasm feels like! It happened from hearing him calling me back, calling me
bitch
. That was how he needed me.

In the bathroom mirror, my eyes looked fucked up. I rubbed my fingers with toilet paper.

I passed by Jody who was still talking on the payphone as I went back to our table. I sat down at my basket, picked up my sandwich and ate the cheese cold. My mother glanced at me and finally she smiled.

§

My dad took breaks from the paper to locate us all. I could see him doing it, calculating: daughter plus daughter plus son plus wife. Daughter plus son plus college girl. Girl plus girl plus girl plus girl. I saw him looking at them in their bikinis. I could tell that some of them even felt it when he looked. They slithered around on their towels, hips oiled, bums up. They liked even the slittiest father eyes on them.

It was the fourth day of our family vacation. I asked my mother if everything was okay. I sat on the edge of her chair at the pool. My mom got kind of defensive, speaking too quickly. ‘Of course I’m okay. It’s just this book.’ And she slammed it shut. I saw the cover closely. Five Korean women were standing or crouching against a rock wall. Their faces were blank but they were dressed in skin-tight silk dresses, with S-shaped, high-buttoned clasps. My mom touched my shoulder. ‘You should wear sunscreen,’ she said. Then she made these little circle movements down my arm as if she was telling me to put it on in a painterly way. I didn’t ever know why my mother had stopped painting. I never asked her either, it was so hard to ask her things. I knew she’d studied painting when she was in university and she made probably hundreds of paintings of these abstract, people-like things – smears of red with shadows for features – that were all over our house when I was a kid. It just seemed like one day all her canvases were gone from the basement where she worked. I saw them wrapped up in garbage bags in the garage.

‘Myra, I’m fine. Everything’s good. It’s fine.’

I almost lay down on that lounge chair with her, I wanted to be smaller to be able to do something like that. I wanted to ask her: Why aren’t you happy? Why aren’t you happy here?

That fourth night we went to this supposedly fancy restaurant, not one of those college-kid joints. This one was called Ralph’s. I knew my mother wanted to leave the second we got there because some twenty-year-old ponytailed shrimp in short shorts was leading us down a black-lit wall to a booth at the back. I was just glad it was dark and they had spaghetti bolognese. Our waitress had on a tight baby-T with a drawn-on tuxedo. Her name tag said
Tammy
. She leaned down into our leathery circular booth to take our order. Jody and Jeff and I were trying not to laugh, but my mom was tense. Even my dad was too quiet.

Later, Jody told us that that place turned into a topless club at night. Kids weren’t supposed to be there. Jeff was fourteen, I was sixteen, Jody was turning nineteen soon.

‘That waitress wasn’t wearing a bra,’ Jeff said when we were back in our room.

‘She had a boob job,’ Jody said. ‘She was probably a triple D or something but her breasts didn’t sag or move at all. That is physically impossible.’

‘Her tits touched my meatballs,’ I said.

‘Breasts,’ my mother said. ‘They’re called breasts.’

‘You’re supposed to put the tip in their cleavage at Ralph’s.’ Jody pursed her lips and made her voice go cutesy and high like Tammy’s. ‘That’s it, put it in there, right in there ... ’

‘Her boobs did look weird,’ I said. ‘Like seals’ heads.’

‘Gross,’ said Jeff.

My mother looked at my father. My father shrugged.

Jody got into bed with me that night and Jeff got into the cot in the middle. I was eating a bag of potato chips, licking my fingers after each one. We were watching a comedy on one of those channels that we didn’t get at home. Bette Midler and Shelley Long were pretending to be Russian sisters who didn’t speak English trying to get on a plane. They had kerchiefs around their heads and the most pathetic, dramatic-y, sad-mask expressions. No one thought they were Russian but they kept pretending to be, and they knew that the attendant at the counter didn’t believe them but they couldn’t stop talking and acting that way, in gibberish Russian, looking fake sad, trying to get pity from the woman at the counter by saying that their father had died and they had to get home. I started laughing so hard at that scene for some reason. The sounds coming out of my mouth became wheezes. They were ridiculous as sisters, too close and never stopping the gibberish talk even though they were in on the same dying joke. They were milking it hard, they kept milking it so hard. Tears rolled down my cheeks. My family started laughing at me mostly because I just couldn’t stop.

GAYL: She laughs at the foreigners.

LEE: She’s not laughing at them because they’re foreigners. They’re pretending to be foreigners.

GAYL: Foreigners are comedy.

LEE: That sounds kind of racist, you know. I thought you said trauma was comedy.

GAYL: You know what I’m talking about.

§

We made one excursion all together on our vacation. The Mel Fisher Maritime Museum was only about eight blocks from our motel. My mother announced that they were having a special exhibition there about two slave ships that had landed in Key West in 1860, which was the very end of slave trade in the U.S.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Sounds happy. Let’s go.’

Jeff whined and Jody brought a book. My dad was the sulkiest, trailing behind.

In the first room of the museum, before the slave-ship exhibition, there were these pieces of wood set up like a sculpture. It was a broken raft, I read, that thirty Cubans had used trying to get across the ocean from Cuba all the way to Key West. This had happened seventeen years ago. All of them died. They’d even found some kid’s T-shirt attached to the raft’s pole like a sail. Those were the actual pieces of wood that people died on that were displayed. There was a rope around the raft but two kids were climbing on it, their parents totally oblivious. Jeff and Jody hadn’t even stopped to see this thing. I think Jody went to go use the phone. Jeff was probably going to go through the entire museum as fast as he could. I was the only one who stopped to look at the raft. Kids our age had died on it. It was a fucking memorial!

‘You better get off that,’ I said to the kids.

They both had sand on their feet and dirty flip-flops. They ran to their mother and whispered in her ear. The mother glared at me. Fucking fuck you, I thought. Your kids are playing on a grave.

My mom poked her head out from the other room. ‘You have to come see this,’ she said.

It wasn’t right that that raft was out there for everyone to touch, for kids to climb on with their dirty little feet. People should take the time to think about what that rotting thing was. It was a death boat for thirty people. I didn’t even have time to deal with what I was thinking. My mother kept calling me out of myself. She wanted to show me a picture, the first picture from the slave-ship exhibition. ‘This is unbelievable,’ she said. ‘Myra, you have to see this, this is unbelievable.’ I cringed at how fast she was talking. Why unbelievable? This all actually happened! Why is this all so hard to believe?

The Last of the Slave Ships
was stencilled on a white wall. There was a detailed, life-size drawing of a really sad-looking African man with a chain around his ankle that looked like it had been photocopied onto the wall. You couldn’t really see his eyes, they were almost slit shut. It was grotesque. Why’d that have to be life-size?

‘Myra! Come here.’ My mother called me from around the corner, where she stood in front of a tiny ink print.

The picture, you had to really look at it close up, showed a boatload of smashed-together people with cuffs and chains around their ankles. They were all black, bony, made out of criss-crosses.

‘Unbelievable,’ my mom said again.

I wanted to take this precious grainy little picture off the wall and stomp on the glass and knee-break its frame. Who the fuck was the artist who could draw so realistically, actually set up an easel and draw people’s bones and chains for hours, draw for hours each little criss-cross on people who were crying beside buckets of slop? Who the fuck was the artist who worked on that to get it all so realistic? And why was my mom saying it was unbelievable?

People are
like
this. This
happened
, I wanted to scream at her. This is not
unbelievable
at all.

I looked that picture in the eyes. I wanted to see that dreadlocked guy again. I wanted to be with him, stay with him, let him do whatever he wanted to me in that room.

My mother had moved on. ‘Oh my god,’ I heard her whisper at the next picture. My mother started to cry. I hated this museum. Who thought that this exhibition was a good idea? It was exploitative. I wanted to stencil that on the walls:
Slavery Is Fucking Exploitation!

My father, pathetic, hadn’t come inside the museum at all. He’d yelled at the woman at the front desk because at our motel it said there was a family price for the museum on weekdays but when we got there that woman said they weren’t taking any coupons. My father said something like, ‘What kind of business are you running?’ And my mom said to the woman, ‘It’s fine, it’s okay.’ Then my father snapped at her, ‘Irene, don’t undermine me!’ It was totally embarrassing that they were having a fight in public over five fucking dollars. The woman at the front desk stared at us like we were the worst kind of tourists, the kind who shouldn’t even be at a serious museum. My mother ended up giving her the extra money so we could just go. My dad had wanted to rent mopeds and drive to Key Largo, saying that I’d go on the back of his bike, Jeff could go on my mom’s and Jody could ride her own because she was pretty much nineteen. My mom thought that mopeds were dangerous and she wasn’t riding one and neither were we.

My mother had moved to the second-last picture of the exhibition, blowing her nose. I noticed that there was a security guard sitting on a stool in the corner. He had acne on his cheeks and his hair was slicked back, like an eagle’s crest. In the etching that my mother was standing in front of there were four women, naked, with short dark hair and hanging breasts. They were on the deck of a ship. The card on the wall said:
The Wildfire, 1868. Artist Unknown.
I was sweating. My thighs rubbed each other under my skirt.

‘Myra, I think I’ve had enough. This is phenomenal. It’s making me feel funny. I’ll wait for you outside.’

My mom’s eyes were all red. I watched her walk quickly out of the room. The security guard watched her too. I thought maybe he was Cuban. Maybe that’s why he worked here. Maybe he told people his story, maybe he knew one of the people who’d drowned seventeen years ago. He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I thought he was thinking my mom couldn’t take it. I shrugged my shoulders back at him. Then I looked at the very last etching on the wall. It was a child, close-up, with a bloated gut. That security guard’s eyes were too big for his face, he had really thick eyebrows too. The child’s eyes were not sad. The anonymous fucking artist who drew that child’s eyes not sad, but really open, with a criss-crossed reflection of a sail inside, made him actually look happy, or peaceful. That child was beside a bucket of slop, in chains. That child was a slave.

‘They say there are these unmarked graves, like, out at Higgs Beach of these people.’

The security guard was behind me, looking at the picture with me. His breath smelled like bread. I was breathing in time.