Wetlands (4 page)

With rhythmic motions I let the handle glide in and out. It feels like the finger of a fourteen-year-old. Like Hansel’s finger of bone. I rub the handle hard between my
labia, back and forth. Harder. It’s the same motion as cutting bread. Hard bread. Forward, back. Forward, back. Sawing. Sawing. Deeper.

Kanell watches me.

“Can you put the lamp on my head? I want to light myself up.”

He stretches the elastic headband around my head and adjusts the lamp so it’s exactly in the middle of my forehead. I look at my pussy and thereby light it up. Kanell walks out of the room. Ooh la la, shaving’s got me hot. I lay the razor on my stomach and stroke my smooth-shaven, naked labia with both hands. Dear nonexistent God are they soft. Soft like kid leather, soft like avocado pits. So soft that I can barely even feel them with my fingers. I rub them faster. And come.

And now? I’m sweaty and out of breath. It’s so hot in here. Where is Kanell? I get dressed. It’s even warmer. He comes in.

I ask: “Do you want to do this again?”

“Love to.”

“When?”

“Every Saturday after work.”

“Good. That’ll give me a week to grow the hair back for you each time. I’ll give it my all. See you then.”

That was the first time I shaved. Or rather, that I was shaved. Anyway: my first shave. Since then we see each
other almost every week. Once in a while he doesn’t buzz me in. Or he’s not home. Then I have to run around for two weeks with stubble. I hate it. Either totally shaved or hairy. It always starts to itch worse and worse. So I have to do it if he doesn’t. But I never do it anywhere near as well as he does. Not as slowly and not as affectionately.

Shaving myself is stupid—I’m spoiled in that regard now. I’m used to being shaved. I think that if men want shaved women, they should take over the shaving. Don’t saddle the women with all the work. In the absence of men, women wouldn’t care at all how hairy they were. The best arrangement I can imagine would be for men and women to shave each other in whatever way they find most pleasing. That way each would have the exact hairstyle that got their partner the hottest. Better than just hoping for the best from the other person or trying to explain it. That’s nothing but trouble.

For me it’s all about just getting it done. I shave myself fast, zigzagging all over the place, and rip myself to shreds. I’m usually bleeding afterward, and the open razor-burn bumps gets infected. Whenever Kanell sees that, he scolds me for treating myself that way. He can’t stand it. But even I’m not as careless as the person who shaved me before the operation on my ass.

A nurse walks in
. Unfortunately, it’s not Robin. Oh well. I can ask her, too.

“What happens if I need to have a bowel movement?”

That’s what they call it. I can break out that phrase, too, if I feel like it. Depending on who I’m talking to.

She explains that as far as the doctors are concerned, it’s desirable that you take a crap as soon as possible. So no log jam develops. She says it’s better for the wound to heal with regular bowel movements so that everything grows back together properly and is able to stretch normally. They must be out of their minds. She says Dr. Notz will be right in to explain everything. She walks out. While I’m waiting for Notz, I think about all the things that can cause constipation. So many things come to mind. Notz comes in. I greet him and look him right in the eyes. I always do that when I’m trying to intimidate someone. It occurs to me what long, full eyelashes he has. I can’t believe it—why didn’t I notice that before? Maybe I was too distracted by the pain. The longer I look at him, the longer and fuller his lashes become. He’s telling me, I think, important things about my bowel
movements, my diet, and my recovery. But I’m not listening. I’m counting his eyelashes. And making noises every now and again that are supposed to make it seem as if I’m listening closely. Uh-huh.

Eyelashes like that I call eye-mustaches. I can’t stand it when men have beautiful lashes. Even on women it bugs me a little. Eyelashes are a constant theme in my life. I always pay attention to them. How long they are, how thick, what color they are, whether they’re dyed, done up with mascara or with a lash curler, or both, whether they’re stuck together with sleepy seeds. A lot are light at the ends and darker at the base so they look much shorter than they really are. If you were to put mascara on them, they’d suddenly look twice as long. Me, I had no lashes at all for many years of my childhood. But I know that before that I used to get lots of compliments on my long lashes.

One day a woman asked my mom if it didn’t bother her that her six-year-old daughter had fuller lashes than she herself did, even though she used mascara and a lash curler. Mom always told me there was an old Gypsy saying: if you get too many compliments about one particular thing, that thing will eventually disappear. That was always her explanation, too, whenever I asked why I no longer had any lashes. I have a lingering mental image, though: In the middle of the night I wake up and mom is sitting on the side of my bed where she usually sits to read me stories. She’s
holding my head still, and I feel cold metal along the edge of my eyelids. Snip. On both eyes. And mom’s voice says, “It’s only a dream, my child.”

With my fingertips I’d always touch the stubs of the lashes. If mom’s Gypsy story were true, the lashes would have fallen out completely. But I can’t really pin it on mom, either, because I often blur the distinctions between reality, lies, and dreams. These days in particular I can’t keep things straight because of all the years I took drugs. The wildest party I ever had happened when my friend Corinna realized Michael, my drug-dealer boyfriend at the time, had forgotten his stash of drugs at her house. There was no occasion for a party. It’s just what you say you’re doing when you take drugs. Partying.

Michael kept all his blotters and pills and packets of speed and coke in a fake soda can. It looked just like a normal can of cola, but you could screw the top off.

Michael always tried to stuff enough drugs into it so it weighed exactly as much as a real can of cola would.

Corinna said: “Check it out, Helen—Michael’s can. He wouldn’t mind, would he?”

She grinned at me, wrinkling her nose in the process. That always means she’s genuinely excited.

We blew off school, bought some red wine at a kiosk, and left a message for Michael on his answering machine: “If you’re looking for cola, we found a whole case in Corinna’s
room. You won’t get pissed if we start drinking without you, will you?”

We were big on using badly coded language over the phone. When you’re taking drugs you get paranoid and confuse yourself with Scarface. You think you’re being listened to and there’s about to be a raid, arrests, and a court proceeding during which the judge will say, “So, Helen Memel, what do the words ‘laundry detergent,’ ‘pizza,’ and ‘painting’ really mean? At no point during this time were you doing laundry, eating pizza, or painting. We didn’t just tap your phone; you were also under surveillance.”

Then began our race against time. The idea was to take as many drugs as possible before the first one took effect and before Michael showed up. Anything we didn’t slurp down we’d have to give back. At nine in the morning we started taking two pills at a time, washing them down with wine. It didn’t seem right to snort speed and coke so early in the morning, so we made minigrenades out of toilet paper.

Half a packet for each us—which is half a gram—poured onto a little piece of toilet paper, skillfully wrapped up, and gulped down with lots of wine. Maybe there was less than a gram per packet—Michael was a good businessman and he messed with everyone a little on the amounts. So he could earn more. One time I weighed something that was supposed to be a gram. Not even close. But people can’t
exactly register a complaint with the police. That’s just the way it is on the black market. No consumer protection.

Anyway, these paper grenades are very tough to get down. It takes practice. If it doesn’t get washed down your throat right away, the minigrenade opens up and the bitter powder sticks to your mouth and gums. You definitely don’t want that.

I guess everything started to kick in. I can only remember the highlights. Corinna and I laughed the whole time and made up stories set in a fantasy land. At some point Michael came by to pick up his can and cursed us out. We giggled. He said if all the stuff we’d ingested didn’t kill us, we would have to pay him back. We just laughed.

Later we puked. First Corinna, then me from the sound and smell of hers. In a big, white bucket. The puke looked like blood because of the red wine. But it took us a long time to figure out why it looked like that. And then we realized there were undigested pills floating around. This seemed like a terrible waste to us.

I said: “Half and half?”

Corinna said: “Okay, you first.”

And so for the first time in my life I drank someone else’s puke. Mixed with my own. In big gulps. Taking turns. Until the bucket was empty.

A lot of brain cells die on days like that. And this, along with other similar parties, definitely took a toll on my
memory. There’s another memory that I’ve never been sure is even a memory. I come home one day from elementary school and call out hello. Nobody answers. So I think nobody’s home.

Then I go into the kitchen and lying there on the floor are my mom and my brother. Hand in hand. They’re asleep. My brother’s head is resting on his Winnie the Pooh pillow and mom’s is on a folded-up, light-green dish towel.

The oven door is open. It smells like gas. What to do? I saw a movie once where somebody struck a match and the whole house blew up. So, nice and slow, I carefully creep over to the oven—there are people sleeping here—and turn off the gas. Then I open the windows and call the fire department. I can’t think of the number for the hospital in order to get an ambulance. Oh, both are on the way … yes, they’re still sleeping … I can ride with them. Two ambulances. A whole crew. Flashing blue lights. Sirens. They have their stomachs pumped at the hospital and dad comes directly from work.

Nobody in the family has ever spoken about it. At least not with me. That’s why I’m not sure whether maybe I dreamed it or made it up and have just convinced myself it’s true over the years. It’s possible.

Mom trained me to be a good liar. To such a degree that I believe most of my own lies. Sometimes it can be fun.
Other times it can be maddening, as in this case. I guess I could just ask mom.

“Mom, did you used to cut off my eyelashes out of jealousy? And another thing: Did you try to kill yourself along with my brother? And: Why didn’t you want to take me with you?”

I never find the right moment.

At some stage my eyelashes grew back and I always curled them and used mascara to make the best out of them —and to piss off my mother in case that memory is a genuine memory. Top and bottom, I want my real lashes to look like plastic false eyelashes from the sixties. I mix cheap and expensive mascara to make the ultimate lashes. The best way is to use the end of the brush, where the mascara accumulates, and just glob it onto the lashes. The goal is for people half a mile away to think: “Wow, she’s a walking set of lashes.”

Mascara is always advertised as not being sticky, and the brush is always supposed to keep the lashes separate so there are no clumps. But for me those are reasons
not
to buy a mascara. When my relatives and neighbors figured out that I never remove the mascara and just put more on every day, a panic broke out.

“If you don’t remove the mascara from your lashes, they never get any light or air—and then they’ll fall out.”

I thought: It couldn’t be any worse than it used to be. And I thought up cool tricks to avoid water ever getting on my lashes. After putting so much money and effort into my lashes, I can’t just let them get ruined in the shower. And besides, when months’ worth of mascara slowly dissolves in hot water and runs into your eyes, it burns. You definitely don’t want that. So I shower in stages. First I wash my hair and wrap it in a towel so the water can’t get into my eyes. Then I do the rest of my body from the neck down. For a while I missed my neck and black, greasy smudges would accumulate in the three indentations at the base of it.

When that happens, if you rub your neck, dark, sticky little rolls form that smell like pus. So you either have to wash from the face down or you have to rub these rolls off your neck regularly. But the important thing is that your face never comes in contact with water. I haven’t put my head underwater for years—not in the bathtub or in the school swimming pool. I have to climb into the pool by the stairs like a granny, and I can only swim the breaststroke because your face, or parts of it, go under water with any other stroke. If someone tries to dunk me, I turn into a fury and scream and beg and explain that it would ruin my lashes. That’s worked so far.

For years I haven’t seen water from below the surface. Obviously that means I never wash my face either. I think it’s overrated anyway. When you take your makeup off with
makeup remover and cotton balls you’re kind of washing your face. Just keep your distance from the eyelashes. That’s the way I’ve been doing it for years. Only one or two lashes have gotten stuck in the curler. And they grew back. So I’ve proved that your lashes don’t all fall out if you don’t remove your mascara every night.

My ex-boyfriend Matt watched me curl my lashes once and asked me whether a row of eyelashes was the same length as the inner pussy lips.

“Yeah. Approximately.”

“And you have two of these curlers?”

“Yep.”

A gold one and a silver one.

He laid me down on the bed. Spread my legs. Pushed aside the ladyfingers and gently clamped my dewlaps with the eyelash curlers. That way he could hold the inner labia away from the hole and look deep inside. A bit like when they force Malcolm McDowell’s eyes open in
A
Clockwork
Orange
. He asked me to hold the curlers and pull them as far apart as felt good. Matt wanted to fuck me immediately and cum on my stretched lips. But first he wanted to take a picture so I could see how pretty my pussy looked all stretched apart. We clapped our hands with joy. Well, he did. My hands were busy.

When you stretch these crinkly flaps of skin all the way out, the total surface is as big as a postcard. At some
point Matt drifted out of my life, but his good idea stayed with me.

I like the feeling I get from stretching my lips with the lash curlers until they look from my perspective like bat wings. Actually, I wonder if that’s why they’re so big and peek out from the ladyfingers? No way. I’m sure they were always so big and long and frayed grayish pink along the edges. All of this goes through my head as I’m ignoring Dr. Notz. Now he wants to leave.

But here comes Helen with the photos of her ass.

He needs to tell me which side is up. I can’t make out an asshole anywhere. No matter which way I turn the camera.

I look at him. He looks at the photos and quickly away again. He’s disgusted by the results of his own surgical work. No wonder he didn’t want to tell me beforehand what he had in mind.

“At least tell me which way I need to hold it to see what it looks like down there.”

“I can’t tell. In my opinion the photo was taken too close up. I can’t tell which way it goes, either.”

He sounds angry. Is he crazy? He’s the one who did this to me. I didn’t mess around with his ass. As far as I’m concerned, I’m the victim and he’s the culprit.

He keeps glancing at the photo and then looking immediately away again. Hopefully he’s able to keep his eyes
on wounds for a bit longer when he’s in the operating room. What a sissy. Or does he enter another world in the operating room? Looks at everything closely in there and just can’t stand to be confronted with it afterward?

Like somebody who always goes to a brothel and does the wildest, most intimate, filthy things with the same hooker, but who, if he runs into her on the street, looks away and would never say hello.

He didn’t greet my asshole very nicely.

He doesn’t want to see it again.

I see panic in his eyes: Help! My little operating room asshole can speak, ask questions. It’s even taken photos of itself.

There’s no point. He just doesn’t know how to communicate with the people attached to the asses he operates on.

“Thanks a lot, Mr. Notz.” That’s supposed to signal that he should leave. I dropped his professional title. That does the trick. He walks out.