Authors: Hannah Tennant-Moore
And it turned out Jared didn't give a shit about my sexy boots. He cared about seeing me from every possible angle, under the brightest lights, his nose an inch from my skin. “Butâ” I'd protest as he parted my legs or rolled me onto my stomach. “Come on,” he'd say. “Let me see you.” Attraction was access to knowledge that could not be gained from any other kind of interaction. There was nothing to hold back.
Most Friday nights, we'd split a bottle of Bushmills and ride our bikes into town. As we were walking into a bar one night, Jared put his foot out and I went straight down, too drunk to try to break my fall. Jared was laughing, but it was the laugh of not wanting the feeling that would come when the laughter ended. I raised myself onto all fours, waited for my nose to stop smarting. He put his hands under my armpits and pulled me up. “You okay?” he asked, almost scared. Something big and metal was clamped over my face. I was afraid that if I tried to talk my voice would come out funny. He moved my nose from side to side and kissed me on the cheek. “You're okay.” We went into the bar. Jared ordered drinks with a series of elaborate hand gestures. He sauntered to the pool table. I went into the bathroom. While I was sitting on the toilet, I took my phone out of my purse and called my father. I told him I was in love. I wanted to give him something to be happy about. “It's three in the morning here,” he said. “Why don't you get some sleep and let's talk tomorrow.” The fear in my father's voice woke me up like a slap. He was normally so supportive of my adventures, encouraging me to tell him everything, he wouldn't judge.
When I left the bathroom, Jared was hitting the balls with the stick, stalking the table, scratching the crack of his ass. He was powerful and essential and doing just fine. I was in love, meaning I was addicted to a specific body; I was afraid.
A few days later, I tried to reassure my fatherâand myselfâabout the state of my new life in California by applying for an internship at the local paper. I had never dreamed of being a journalist, but this seemed like one way I might be able to put my feelings to use.
The newspaper office was marked by a small sign that looked like an ad for a newspaper in a children's comic book: an illustration of a typewriter spewing a page that said
Carp Weekly
in bubbly letters. The interior was a fluorescent-lit room crammed with people, desks, books, papers, phones, computers covered in Post-it notes, fax machines, mugs, stale bagels. The chaos relaxed me. The woman who interviewed me looked damaged in a way that made her dull and approachable rather than threatening. She introduced herself as Sallyâno last name, no title. She was impressed with my writing samples, even more so when I told her they were papers from a high school English class. The lie I'd plannedâabout having dropped out of the last semester of college to care for a dying parentâfelt unnecessary. In fact, Sally seemed glad to learn I hadn't gone to college, like it gave me some secret cachet. She even used the term “self-taught,” which sounded pretentious, but I did read a lot and obsessively analyze my thoughtsâwas that being “self-taught”? I learned from the card Sally handed me at the end of the interview that she was the managing editor.
The next day, she called and offered me not the unpaid internship but an actual job. They happened to be looking for someone to run the obituary section. I suggested that I might not be qualified. “Believe me, you're overqualified,” Sally said. “The job is mostly dealing with crazies.” I set up an interview with the publisher, which Sally suggested was mostly a formality. Donnie asked me my favorite authors, was condescendingly impressed. Nine bucks an hour, no benefits; no wonder they were willing to overlook my inexperience. But I liked the idea of having a title: assistant editor.
They gave me a cubicle on the newsroom floor. Sally fielded my first phone call by way of training. “Thank you for your interest in
Carp Weekly
. I have to stress right off the bat that we do not publish typical obituaries. These are more like personal essaysâstories rather than a rundown of events and accomplishments. If you would prefer to run a standard obituary, I am more than happy to refer you to our advertising department.” She hung up the phone, showed me the coffee machine and the microwave, left me to set up my email.
As I was struggling with an Ethernet cord, a middle-aged man came out of the office next to mine, and sans introâthe kind of shorthand I soon learned to associate with himâstarted telling me about a woman who had been murdered by her ex-husband a few days ago. “Been divorced for twenty-five years. At least the douche bag never found anyone else to hate. Small consolation, I grant.” Joe was pale and lanky with faintly humped shoulders, but his voice made him seem like he tossed pianos for fun. “She was a retired teacher, had a little house with a garden, named Effie or something like that. You get the picture.” His phone rang. He returned to his desk in two strides. “Yello,” he belted. “Thanks for the callback. So listen, what the fuck is up with this cat running for city council?” Less than a second elapsed between the end of his phone call and his reappearance at my desk. “So the woman's got a sister. Only kin mentioned in the daily. What I'd do, if I were you, is look up that sister.” Joe carried on the conversation like this, bounding between my desk and his, sometimes picking up his thoughts mid-sentence.
I was dismayed by how easy it was to track down the sister's name and phone number. I was often nervous calling a friend to ask if she wanted to get a drink when I was alone in my house, and now I was supposed to dial a stranger and ask if she wanted to write an essay for me on her recently murdered sister, while I was surrounded by coworkers with hard, avid faces, jamming down computer keys and talking loudly into headsets (“
Carp Weekly
, Bill speaking”). I told myself I could quit tomorrow, just make the call, there was nothing riding on this. But every time I was about to press the last digit, I panicked and hung up, fidgeted with my empty Rolodex. At last, I took my purse and slipped out the back door. I made the call from the parking lot. When the sister answered, I repeated Sally's spiel about our obituaries being more like personal essays. The sister asked my name, told me how relieved she was that I called. She wanted so much for there to be an obituary about Barb but her eyesight was bad and she could no longer type. Was there any wayâand please tell her if this was inexcusably rude, she was not entirely in her right mind at the momentâbut perhaps, maybe, was there any way she could tell me her memories and I could type them up?
I started offering this dictation service whenever I requested an essay. I made the calls from my cubicle once I realized that everyone was too harried to notice anyone else. For a while, the work suited me in the way it suited Joe to be a reporter. He never seemed to be in conflict with himself, even when he was screaming into his phone, “You wanna hear libel? Go on and sue me and hear what this town has to say about your quote unquote
business
. You know, pal, it's never too late to stop wasting your life being an asshole.” He slammed down the phone, stood in his doorway eating a doughnut, shouted at me from across the newsroom. “We gotta get something good for the Iraq vet who shot himself and his dad. Look up his girlfriend. Word of advice: Don't mention a goddamn thing about the Middle East or IEDs or PTSD. You just let her remember himâcolor of his cuticles, favorite license plate number, all that shit. Then she might actually open up to me when I call.”
I loved being near Joe's devotion, and I liked being implicated in the socially condoned spectacle of unhinged death-grief. It made me feel less alone, a kind of selfishness I accepted in myself.
Jared would sometimes use his belt on me, never against my will. He didn't hit hard. He'd hold my arms down and place his teeth around my nipple, poised to clamp down. “Stop, stop, stop,” I'd say and he'd tell me to shut up, backhanding my jaw. He'd order me to take my clothes off, but it never became more sexual than that. This wasn't about sex. It was about having power over life. Jared wanted to believe he had some and I wanted to give all mine away. I wanted bruises, empirical proof of the destructiveness of emotions. The first time he hit me too hard, I winced and put my hand to my jaw. He fell on me with a look of terror and wet my face with kisses. “Sweetie, baby, oh no, did I hurt you?”
Because yes and no were both the wrong answer, we kept pushing the limit. We wanted moreâlonger strangulations, redder marks, deeper and murkier troughs of shame and forgiveness. Sometimes when Jared got up to pee in the night and I watched his buttocks moving toward the toilet, exhausted and trusting, the whitest thing in the room, I felt a tenderness I could not bear without violence. It was the same feeling that kept me awake at night in junior high, scratching at my chest until I drew blood. Sometime in seventh grade, I developed a nearly constant irritation in my chest, like tiny claws scratching me from the inside. My annoyment knot, I called it, but only to myself. Some nights I'd claw at my chest until I felt warm wetness beneath my fingernails; then I'd lie awake thinking that there was something seriously wrong with me and I needed to find the right person to make it better. The knot sometimes compelled me to wear something weird to schoolâa flowered shower cap or jeans with one leg cut off and the other long or leotards snapped over the crotch of my jeans instead of under them. There had to be something you could do.
My dad got me the Liz Phair album when I was in high school. He thought I would like it, and I did. I blasted it every time I borrowed his car, affecting her girlish earnestness, just self-conscious enough to pretend toward irony.
I could take this in doses large enough to kill.
Jared's butt cheeks were almost repulsive in their vulnerabilityâdisproportionately small, cuddled against each other, the skin a mottled red sprouting long, curly, brown hairs. I was entrusted with their care. When Jared gripped my neck and banged my head against his flimsy bedroom wall, my tenderness was forced out of my chest and into the world. I imagined him as a kid, sitting alone in the backyard after school, waiting for his father to get home from work, plucking a thick blade of grass and holding it taut between his thumbs. In tenth grade, he dropped out of school to go on tour with the Grateful Dead. His father gave him three hundred bucks and wished him luck. Jared hitchhiked and begged and slept in city parks for the next two years. I was the whistle the blade of grass made when his small self blew against its sharp edge.
Once I tried to explain to Jared the need to do violence to my love. Then I giggled, hoping I sounded as cavalier as Liz Phair. He was hard in an instant. He gripped my shoulders and pressed his open mouth to my collarbone and pushed inside me. For a long time, neither of us moved. In my mind, a small wave tumbled over itself to fall on dry sand, then retreated into the deep vast blue. Tumbled, retreated, tumbled again.
When I was seven, we moved out of the cultured, lovely town of Northampton, Massachusetts, to a shithole inhabited by cretins a few miles away because it was the only place my parents could afford the decrepit yet palacial Victorian house my mother believed she needed to live in to be happy. She was thoughtful enough to rent a post-office box so that I could, illicitly, keep going to school in Northampton, but she did not consider that since she hated to drive and my father worked during the week, living nearly an hour away from school would severely limit my ability to have friends or play sports. “Oh please, as if you were just about to take up field hockey,” she said in response to my complaints. She was right: I preferred reading in bed to any other activity in the world. By moving me an hour away from the only civilization I'd known and giving me my own floor in a giant house that was always freezing since my father's intermittent videography work could not cover an exorbitant electricity bill, my mother ensured that I would rarely have to leave my comfort zone.
I was about eight when I discovered the mirror trick. I would lock myself in the downstairs bathroom, the one with a mirror that covered the whole wall above the sink. Sitting cross-legged on the cool black tiles, my knees and forehead touching the glass, I stared into my eyes. For the first few minutes, I noticed my thin lips, blue eyes, the freckles shaped in a heart next to my left nostril. I made tiny facial movementsâwidening my eyes, puckering my lipsâto convince myself that the person I was seeing corresponded to my actual self, in real time. But gradually, as I sat and stared, my face became foreign to me, the way a particular word loses its meaning if you say it aloud over and over. The arrangement of my features looked alien, in the child's sense of the word. Later, when Magic Eye drawings became popular, I was reminded of the exact second of the mirror feeling's arrival every time I stared at one of those computer-generated creations, and a mass of indistinguishable colored dots suddenly gave way to an intricate sceneâa scientist pouring from a flask, a girl kicking a soccer ball. For a time, I was addicted to the exhilarating discomfort of seeing myself as unrecognizable. I'd always end up rolling around on the bath mat, mesmerized by this sensation that was the absence of all learned physical sensations. Of course I had none of these thoughts at the time. It was not I, but my body, that was bewildered.
My mother burst into my room one night while my father and I were playing Connect Four. She shook a woman's magazine in the air above our heads and read out loud: “Leave him after the first slap!” I had never seen my father slap my mother, but he didn't deny he had. Mostly, he seemed not to really participate in their fightsâlike at Thanksgiving, when she had screamed “Shit! Shit! Shit!” because the bakery ran out of her favorite kind of pie. My father read a novel on the couch through her cries. It had been his job to pick up the pie.
The kitchen table was my mother's favorite place to cry. Her sobs made me think of gasping fish, flopping about on the bottom of a ship. On the nights after their fights, my dad would read to me before bed, sitting on the floor with his back against my twin bed, his voice straining toward sweetness. After he shut out the light and left, I would roll onto my stomach with my fists pressed against my chest and imagine floating high above everyone I knewâparents, teachers, classmatesâuntil each familiar head became an indiscriminate black dot before fading into the green-speckled earth.The trick helped, a little. I learned to hear the screaming as wordless, the sound of the space between two people, any two people, every two people.
My mother met another man and separated from my father when I was in sixth grade. I went out for dinner with my mom and her new boyfriend a few times. Rick didn't speak to me. He just looked at my mother's made-up face with this vacant urgency, as if a need that belonged to someone else had gotten lost inside him and was searching for a way out. He gave me a teddy bear for my eleventh birthday, just when I was discovering lip gloss and MTV. Rick and my mother moved to Phoenix, where one of his buddies had promised him a job “making bank”âmy mom giggled when she repeated the phrase to meâas a sales rep for some popular online store. My mother invited me to move with her, but I stayed with my father, who always had time for me. He hadn't had any videography assignments in a while. He was always talking about making a documentary, but whenever he started seriously pursuing one of his ideasâdoing research, contacting potential interview subjectsâhe decided there wasn't enough information or it had already been done or another cause was more important.
Strange, but the years after my mother left weren't so bad. I now had an excuse for how I was. I was the girl whose mother had abandoned her; it was only natural that I be eerie and withdrawn, that I show up to school in strange outfits that made people laugh nervously and give me a wide berth. It was satisfying to discomfit my peers, whom I saw as obsessed with grades and clothes and popularity. And it was nice to be free of my anger at my mother's mopiness and erratic, desperate laugh. My father was an easier personâor at least it seemed that way to me, his child, his favorite part of life. He let me cut class whenever I wanted. We'd drive around in his pickup truck, listen to loud music, blast the heat, roll down the windows, sing along with Radiohead and R.E.M., my dad tapping the beat into the dashboardâ
It's been a bad day, please don't take a picture
âand my dirty blond hair flying in the icy air and catching on my tongue. Listening to tidy song feelings captured by my father's voiceâ
Destiny, protect me from the world
âI felt protected from everything except his thin lips and pale skin and watery blue eyes, all just like mine. Sometimes he would turn down the music and ease off the accelerator and start talking about getting whipped by his father and all the hope he'd poured into falling in love with my mother and how he felt like such a failure for never having made a film of his own, but he'd made me and that was really enough, wasn't it? I liked my father's words, their solemn import attached to my silly life of carrying a heavy backpack to and from a brick cube. I knew there was something wrong with my father's lack of restraintâa needy egotism inherent in philosophizing to one's childâbut so many times, embedded in his ramblings, was some comment that soothed my inner turbulence. Every closeness is a prison. Another thing my father used to say.
Dan and I had a lot of classes together in ninth grade, but I didn't really notice him until he started calling me with questions about math homework. He wore very uncool turtlenecks and never made jokes. But he laughed a lot and said quietly smart things in class. His presence was calming. I went to his house for the first time during a hailstorm. There were about ten people from my grade there. One of the girls had an older brother with a fake ID, so we had two fifths of vodka. I had never been drunk before. After my third or fourth shot, I sat down on the bed next to Dan. “This is a new life,” I said. He wrapped me in his long arms. I giggled against his chest, a little kid again, unburdened by implications: Everything happening was just what was happening. We started kissing, oblivious to the other people making out and talking around us. A shirtless girl fluttered into Dan's room. “Dan!” she cried, unhooking her bra and dangling it from her finger. She ran toward the bed. A beam from the low A-frame ceiling took her out cold. Torrents of laughter. Dan helped her up, rolling his eyes at me.
A few weeks later I was in Dan's twin bed, wearing only my underwear. He was propped up on his elbow beside me, holding my hip with one hand. “I'm not going to let you put your clothes back on,” he whispered. “You're so beautiful.” His were the only thoughts about my body that existed. There was a guitar on the floor beside us and I asked him to sing to me. He sat on the edge of the bed. I curled myself around his back, my head resting on his corduroys. I was still too nervous to take off his pants. He sang about ripplin' still water and free fallin'. He glanced at the Bob Marley poster above his bed and lowered his face to mine. “Is this love is this love is this love that I'm feeling?” I added my voice to his. This was the reason people did not erase themselves from the universe. Dan's parents yelled up the stairs that it would soon be dinnertime. I phoned my dad. I glided into the passenger seat of his truck. Words came out of his mouth. Short, silvered ribbons of light came out of mine.
When Dan and I lost our virginity to each other, I never considered that sex would get far better and far worse than this. “We fit together,” he said. I clutched his back. My body traced the letters of the perfect sentence that was sex. A saccharine image because that's how it felt. I was fifteen. I stared out the frosted-glass windows during Spanish class and math class and while taking a history test. There was nothing else to think about.
One Friday afternoon some months later, Dan and I were lying on his bed after school. Warm air, weary from a long summer, stewed in his room. I was wearing a long, silky skirt that made me feel adulthood as a sensuous promise. He ran his fingers through my hair. I turned my lips to his. “I think we should break up,” he said. “I'm just not attracted to you anymore.” I rolled and jumped at the same time, landing near his doorway. It seemed then that those words had appeared suddenly in the air around our intertwined bodies, and Dan had snatched them up on a whim. But once I was alone again, trudging through the activities required to be a person, I understood that his words had been hovering over us all along.
This is the romantic advice I got from my father: “If you cut off a hen's head and then dangle it in front of a rooster, the rooster will start doing the mating dance. All it takes is a bloody gizzard. Keep that in mind when the boys ask you on dates.”
But boys never asked me on dates. They invited me into closets and bathrooms at parties in dark basements. They invited me to come over when their parents were out of town. I remembered the gizzard, and if I wentâI usually wentâit was not because I wanted to feel special or loved or chosen. I wanted to feel good, the way I had when I was in bed with Dan.
A boy from my English classânice enough, cute enoughâinvited me over to watch a movie. I said hello to his mother and younger sister, working on math homework together at the kitchen table, and followed the boy to the basement. He put on
Fight Club
and we watched the first fifteen minutes. He suggested we go into the adjoining guest room and lie down. I agreed right away; the movie was disturbing me. We kissed stiffly for a minute or two. He pulled off my shirt and inhaled my nipples. He pushed me to his waist. I never said no to their demands, stated or implied. I was there to lose control, to be surprised by another person, to share an interaction entirely unlike the dull, inane, faintly mean chatter of which most of my interactions consisted. I wanted to be roused. And the boy's moans did arouse me, so much that I could hardly wait to pull off my jeans. Maybe I'd even have sex with him that night. But arousal did not lead to pleasure. It led to millions of sperm dying in my mouth. Two minutes of dutiful cuddling. Buckling of pants. Ejecting of movie (how it enraged me to see the care with which he returned the DVD to its container). That was fun. See you around.
There were many encounters like this. They taught me a new kind of pain. In bed alone afterward, I would lie on my back with my arms clenched at my sides, heart crashing against my ribs, stupid hope pecking my skin. My body did not know to stop waiting.
You could say I was a slut. You could say the boys were assholes. You could say we were hungry people who had been led to a buffet and informed that the only way we could eat was to lie on our backs under the table, blindfolded, openmouthed. When I complained to a friend with a lumpish, flat-chested body about unsatisfying hookups, she said, “But you're so pretty! I always thought the only reason guys would treat me that way is because they found me disgusting.”
A few years later, when I was living in Paris, I was bored and lonely and looking for something sexy to read on the Internet. I stumbled on a chat room of seemingly college-age boys describing the blow jobs they'd gotten. One of them described going to a girl's room to “watch a movie.” The phrase was in quotes, followed by a smiley face emoticon. He got the best BJ of his life. This girl was mad skilled. She invited him to come over again the next night, but he's like set on BJs for at least a week, dude. Smiley face. He didn't even try to pick up the hot chick giving him the eye in the elevator as he left the skilled girl's dorm room. Smiley face. Instead he went straight back to his room to write about the BJ to a bunch of strangers. He was still fuckin' high on life. Exclamation point.
The girl had invited this boy over; she had lowered her head to his waist, swallowed his semen, displayed no need for reciprocation, invited him to come over again whenever he wanted. Who wouldn't take such pleasure freely offered? I got so wet reading the boy's post that I had to touch myself, imagining his perfect selfishness.
Like the girl with the mad BJ skills and the girl eyeing the satiated dude in the elevator, I kept on giving away what I wanted for myself. I wanted to come in some pretty slut's mouth. Pull up my pants. Walk homeâmind clear, body light. But my body refused me this ease. When a boy got naked with me, he ejaculated. When I got naked with a boy, my body became a shapeless vibration of erotic feeling building slowly untilâhe grunted and rolled away and I remained frozen for hours in the wide-awake vibrating place.
The more I gave away what I wanted for myself, the hungrier I became, filled with the loud idea of sexual release, never the reality. I began insisting on my own orgasm, however perfunctory; I often had to move the boy's hand with my own. Only an orgasm dulled the anxious clamor of needs aroused and abandoned. With Danâwhose twenties whittled him into a slack-haired, overweight, jovial real estate agent whom I am glad I didn't marryâI'd had no expectations of the form my pleasure would take; every good feeling was a surprise. After Dan, orgasms were a salve. They separated my longing from the man who had aroused it. He had fulfilled his purpose; I could want him to leave and enjoy the desire for his absence.