The Brutal Language of Love (3 page)

“Because,” I said. Absently, I put a hand on his crotch. “I didn't feel weird or anything. I didn't feel dizzy.”

“Did you black out?” Jennings asked me.

I shook my head. “No.”

“What stinks?” he said.

I smelled under my arm. “Me.”

“How about I give you a bath?” Jennings asked, turning to look at me. He laid a hand over mine, which was still on his crotch.

“With your mother downstairs?”

He shrugged. “She's leaving in a few minutes.”

“Okay,” I said. We waited until we heard the front door slam then went into the bathroom. It wasn't the first bath Jennings had given me. He liked to wash between my legs then get in with me and do it underwater. Sometimes we fell asleep in the tub afterward. My mother always said I smelled good when I came back from Jennings's, and I told her it was Ms. Jennings's air freshener.

Before I left that evening I gave Jennings the picture of the lady Santa from the Porta Potti. He told me it was beautiful and that she looked just like me.

Jennings helped me study for the next round of
the spelling bee, a citywide competition. For every ten words I got right, he touched me between my legs; for every ten words I got wrong, I sucked him off, which was no kind of punishment, really, since I enjoyed being intimate with Jennings.

In school he was getting tired of pretending he didn't like me, and sometimes, accidentally, he'd smile and wave when we passed each other in the hall. I wished he wouldn't do that since it only further infuriated his friends, who were still fuming over the way I had insinuated myself back into the spelling bee. They couldn't understand why Jennings wasn't angrier with me, and as far as I could tell, he had made them no explanations.

His friend Garrett was particularly mad. Garrett had the face of a desperate baby bird, framed by long yellow hair that he constantly shook out of his eyes instead of pushing back with his hands. His legs were bowed and he wore aviator glasses, just like my brother-in-law, Vic. It seemed unfair that I should be attacked for being fat when someone like Garrett was running around free, but that was the way it went.

Garrett sat behind me in music class and kicked me hard in the behind while we listened to Beethoven's Fifth, trying to decipher the cello parts. I kept waiting for Mrs. Krieg to hear the sound of my chair squawking across the floor, which it did every time Garrett's foot landed on my ass, but he was careful to kick me only when the music got loud. What could I do? He had two friends sitting on either side of him, laughing each time he made his move. My neck began to hurt more than my butt from the whiplash of being jerked around. I reached back to rub it and Garrett stabbed me in the finger with his pencil.

One afternoon when Jennings washed me, he said I had a yellow-and-blue bruise on my backside. I told him Garrett had done it, hoping he would offer to kill him, but he didn't say anything. Later, in his bedroom, he took out a porno magazine showing two people doing it doggy-style and suggested this might be more comfortable for me in my condition. It did ease the pressure on my back, but I still hoped for a little bit more. As we lay together afterward beneath his down quilt, I said, “Jennings, I'm beginning to fear for my safety.”

“I can see that,” he said sympathetically. We always lay sideways, facing each other and hugging. Jennings's breath smelled of peanut butter and rum.

“Don't you fear for my safety?”

He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Yes.”

I touched his hair, which was curly and dark. “Jennings,” I said, “are you my boyfriend?”

“Yes,” he said again.

Even though he was still looking straight at me, I suspected this was a lie and began to cry. I would have cried if he'd told me the truth, too. People said all kinds of crazy things to make others believe their lives weren't as bad as they really were, and for the most part it seemed to work. Only Jonquil told the truth on a regular basis, and she was the saddest person I had ever known.

Jennings thought I was crying because of Garrett and so quickly offered to hypnotize him the following day in the boys' bathroom, using Dr. Flay's technique. I reminded him that despite my key word I was getting fatter by the minute, and suggested Jennings beat Garrett up instead—an idea he resisted.
“Larynx,”
he whispered in my ear.

“L-A-R-Y-N-X,” I answered back.
“Larynx.”

He laughed and pushed a brand-new erection up against my stomach. “No,” he said. “The key word to keep Garrett from kicking you will be
larynx.
”

The next day I met Jennings in the girls' rest room before music class. He confirmed he had successfully hypnotized Garrett using a small penlight during social studies, while the rest of the class sat in the dark watching a film about nuclear war. We stood on top of a toilet seat in the mauve-colored stall, touching each other as we spoke, and Jennings made me promise to come over to his house right away after school.

In music class I turned around in my seat and said,
“Larynx!”
forcefully to Garrett, who looked back at me blankly. “Turn around, ugly,” his friends said, and I did, but I took my time about it. Garrett really did look hypnotized. He looked as stupid and bland as I had imagined he might, once stripped of all his cruelty.

Mrs. Krieg put on Beethoven, and to be sure I was safe, I turned around and whispered,
“Larynx!”
once more. Garrett wasn't even looking at me; he was noting the timpani with a pencil on his sheet music. “Shh!” Mrs. Krieg hissed at me, and I understood then that her hearing was selective.

When I went to see Jennings after school, eager to ask him how he had really made Garrett stop kicking me, Garrett himself was there, sitting on Jennings's bed. The two of them were flipping through a
Playboy
and both had erections in their pants. “Roz,” Jennings said, setting the magazine aside and standing up. His penis pointed at me like the finger on an Uncle Sam poster. “I was thinking you could have sex with Garrett today instead of me. Just for today,” he added hurriedly. Garrett stood up then, too, his erection pointing down at the ground. He cleared his throat and put his hands in his pockets.

“Oh,” I said, trying not to sound scared. “No thanks.” I stayed and talked with them for a while about nuclear holocaust, which didn't diminish their erections in the least. We all agreed germ warfare was the wave of the future, then I went home and called Jonquil. She was still at work so she couldn't talk long, but she told me not to go over to Jennings's house again, and to deny anything anyone might say about me in school from this day forward, should it come to that.

Things were okay for a while then. I ignored Jonquil's advice and continued making love with Jennings most afternoons, pretending nothing had ever happened with Garrett. In music class I stopped saying
larynx,
but Garrett didn't kick me anyway. I wondered if it had something to do with germ warfare and our shared views on that subject. I might have asked him about it had I not gone on to lose the citywide spelling bee.

“I should never have let you back into the competition!” Mrs. Googan screeched when I called to tell her the news. “Think how poor Jennings must feel right now!” I went across the street to ask him and he said he didn't give a shit. But if I wanted to make it up to him, he said, he had just gotten a new Polaroid for Christmas and needed someone to pose. I sat on his bed with my legs apart and wearing a Santa hat, like the lady from the Porta Potti. When I left I took the pictures with me, which Jennings said was no fair until I reminded him of how he had tried to sell me to Garrett. “You broke the bond of trust,” I informed him, copying something Jonquil had said, and he nodded pitifully.

What neither Mrs. Googan nor I had anticipated was that my losing the semifinals would reignite Garrett's anger on behalf of Jennings. He began a campaign of kicking so strenuous that I developed a cyst on my tailbone and had to stay home from school for a week. At the end of the week, when the cyst was at its most inflamed, the doctor sliced it open and drained all the pus. He proceeded to examine me inside and out, though I had no other health complaints, after which he tersely informed my mother that my hymen was missing.

My mother demanded to know where it had gone and I quickly claimed I had been born without one. She searched my room anyway, almost as if she were looking for it, and found the Polaroid pictures of me instead. “
Sputnik
my ass!” she said, flipping through them. “You haven't lost any weight at all!” I wanted to tell her Jennings loved those pictures and that contrary to what she or Dr. Flay might think, I didn't anticipate any future problems finding men. But I didn't, of course. I watched out my bedroom window as she charged across the street to Jennings's house, pictures in hand, prepared to shock and dismay his mother.

It had been light out when my mother left to see Ms. Jennings, and it was dark when she returned. She had been crying, I could tell, and she no longer had the Polaroids. “Where are my pictures?” I demanded to know, and she looked at me like I was Jonquil.

“
Your
pictures?
Your
pictures?”

I didn't have an answer to that. While she was gone I had cooked up some Old El Paso, and now we sat down together to eat it. My mother had one taco and I went ahead and had three, since she didn't seem in the mood to count. For once she watched me eat with a kind of interest, as if she were thinking, How in the world can a thirteen-year-old eat so damn much? Somebody tell me,
please.

I smiled at her while I was chewing and she turned stern again. “Well!” she announced suddenly. “
Your
pictures have been chopped up and placed inside Leslie Jennings's purse to be disposed of at her office, where that sorry son of hers can't retrieve them and piece them back together.”

“Oh,” I said. I wiped red, spicy grease from my fingers, which smelled of beef and corn.

“As for you,” my mother continued, “there will be no more visits across the street.”

I didn't say anything. I had no intention of going back there anyway. It was a little late, but I was planning to listen to Jonquil from now on, no matter how sad it made me.

“I'm telling you,” my mother continued, “if I find out you've been over there, you'll be out on the street like your sister.”

There was no point in disputing that, either, since if she did put me out, my sister would take me in and I'd be happier than ever.

I returned to school to find that Garrett had been expelled for attacking me, and that Mrs. Krieg had been replaced by Mr. Sconzo, who was fat like me and said if anyone bothered me to let him know so he could kick some booty. He listened to old American folk music instead of classical, and told us to try to enjoy the songs as a whole instead of picking out all the little bitty parts.

Jennings and I were civil in school. He asked if I would mind leaving my bedroom curtains open at night when I undressed, which I saw no harm in doing. I missed him terribly.

Three years later, as sophomores in high school,
Garrett and I were in class together again. It was math, and he had changed considerably since the seventh grade, wearing round glasses and a short haircut reminiscent of John Lennon before he was killed. Beyond that, everything else about him seemed thicker and more controlled, as if he were now less inclined to commit violence, though if he got it into his head to do so, it would probably hurt a lot more.

I, too, was different. Having replaced my malfunctioning key word with an unsensible diet, compulsive exercise, and moderate vomiting, the pounds had finally begun to drop off. My mother was elated and to celebrate taught me how to shave my legs and apply makeup. The word around school was that I was now officially pretty and could finally be treated as such. I thought this would mean dates and parties, but really it just meant no one threw me into lockers anymore or called me names, which would be unseemly at our ages anyway. Ultimately the past haunted us all, and no one was prepared to nominate me for elective office or drop my name in the hat for homecoming queen. I became the leader of a group of smart quiet girls and closeted gay boys, all of us sexually frustrated.

When Garrett walked into class that day, however, I experienced an overwhelming sense of anticipation, as if his purpose in being there extended well beyond the realm of geometry. He took the empty seat behind me seemingly out of habit, and, evolved as he appeared, I could not help but find myself preparing to be assaulted. When the bell rang and this had not happened I ran to the rest room, weepy over his generous restraint and how, to my great shame, this made me love him.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to either of us, Jennings and I had gotten puppies within a month of each other and were now meeting regularly in the street while our dogs relieved themselves on the neighbors' lawns. He complimented me on my new figure and I squeezed the biceps he was cultivating for crew. His grades had improved drastically since we had stopped making love, and his mother had seen fit to enroll him in a private high school across town. He said the girls there were nothing like me, and now that I had gotten thin he could see he was really missing out.