Dear Digby (4 page)

[[Footnote]]

*
I’m a trained Black Belt.

A
FTER SUPPER AND
the dwindling campfire: unexpected rain. A huge rustle, an intimate downpouring, coming in fast over the tops of the trees. We stamped the fire into hanging smoke. “Good night, Dad,” I called as the fathers went off. I lifted my red hunting cap and felt the drops, cold minnows, down the back of my neck.

We pushed each other into the tent, laughing and yelling, smudging matches till the kerosene lantern took, then turned odd gold faces to one another, the three boys and me. A long silence. Somebody popped bubble gum in fast snaps and sucking-in noises. The tent walls were sweating like skin and twitched at the pitch poles in the high wind, in the rifting piss-sound of rain.

I yawned. I took six green, gold, and brown mottled feathers from my pocket, turning them over in the light. Then I felt them all looking at me.

Sons of colonels, sons of officers, Army brats. Next to my olive-drab sleeping bag, my .22 lay in its case, much-prized Christmas present, predictable climax to a long gift history of fishing rods, baseball bats, boxing gloves.
“Willis my boy,”
he said.

“Willis. What kind of name is that for a girl? If she
is
a girl. She sure doesn’t look like one.” The big one threw these remarks over his shoulder to the others as he unrolled his sleeping bag. The others laughed nervously.

I pulled off the red hat, the braids unwinding to my shoulders, shrugging off drops like the retriever.
Now do I look like one?
I didn’t have to speak. I unrolled my bag, fished some oily rags from beneath, picked up the .22 to clean it.

I’d shot six pheasants, blown them up as they broke cover, before the dogs pointed, before anyone had time to think. The act of killing interested me less than speculation on points of vulnerability in the field. Though I wouldn’t have put it quite that way at eleven. I’d have said I liked to “sight,” that I had an eye. What wished desperately not to move moved at last, had to move: The muscles of the heart expanded in the chest cavity, the delicate nerves of the wing twitched in fear. I didn’t think about what happened after that. I had some kind of psychic spotter on the beating hearts and the aching wings in the brush. Then I stopped looking. I held my breath and pulled the trigger. Sure shot.

He had an Orange Crush bottle—it blazed in his hand in the lantern light. The rain started in harder. The littlest boy, Stevie MacAllister, shrieked in expectation. “Whaddya gonna do, Matthew, watcha doin’?”

Later I’d hear my mother’s voice behind their bedroom door. “You let her sleep in a tent with the boys. What were you trying to prove? What did you think would happen?”

Maybe he was trying to prove once and for all that I was a boy; maybe he thought I’d beat them all up. Or he’d recognized that we’d both have to admit, finally, that I was a girl—after I took the worst of it. But what did he think
I’d
think, or feel, coming up against the inevitable in that tent?

“We’re gonna play Spin the Bottle. We’re all gonna play.”

I laughed. “Which means that you guys get to kiss each other when it points to any of you.”

Stevie, the little one, whooped in giddiness, then covered his mouth and peered at me, like a little Monkey Speak No Evil.

“No,
Willis,
you’re wrong.” He was a big, squat kid, Matthew, eleven or so, twelve. He was good looking, brown curls and labrador brown eyes, but his movements were jerky; he looked away from the things he talked to or touched.

He wasn’t looking at me as he addressed me. “Nah, I think that Colonel Digby’s daughter here will get kissed the most, because she’s a girl, aren’t you?”

I looked at him, but he wasn’t looking at me—or the other boys either. He was blind, in himself. “I’m not
exactly
a girl,” I said.

He didn’t seem to hear. He set the bottle down, and when he took his hand away it seemed to begin turning in circles by itself, because he was not looking at what he was doing.

The second oldest, Danny, hung the lantern from a pole. The lantern began swinging to its own rhythm, switchblading light all over the tent. The pure lack of emphasis on Matthew’s face drew light.

The bottle stopped, pointing directly at the tent flaps.

“Hey, Matthew?” I yelled. “Go out there and kiss a big fat grizzly bear. That’s where it’s pointing.”

“Guess what?” He pursed his lips and made big wet kissing noises. “I get another turn, since it didn’t designate anyone.” The word “designate,” an adult word, remained in the air.

I shivered and put the rifle aside. The bottle stopped at Stevie. I leaped in the air. “Hah—ahah—kiss away, Matthew Kissyface Smoochbird! Kiss that kid on the mouth! Woo-woo!”

I rolled around on the floor, shrieking with laughter, then I sat up and applauded them both solemnly. I stuck the pheasant feathers in my braids and winked and wolf-whistled, a finger at each corner of my mouth.

“Let’s go. Whaddya waiting for, you sly turtledovies, you. Hey,
let’s go.”

Matthew looked just over my head, his eyes glittering. “No. What it means for whoever’s spinning the bottle is that if it stops at anyone other than you, that person gets to kiss you.”

“Whaddya mean, Matthew?
That
means I
always
get kissed.”

“That’s right,
Willis.”

“No, that’s
wrong.”
I stood up. “I don’t like this game. I’m not going to play anymore.”

Matthew stood up too, pulling Stevie to his feet. “Yeah, you are.”

I caught Danny’s face in my peripheral vision; he was staring emotionless: the one who looks on. Then Stevie was in my arms. I fell backward with him. We looked terrified into each other’s eyes. Then we looked up at Matthew.

“Kiss her.”

Stevie made a terrible face.

“Kiss her.”

“Get
off,
Stevie, you’re hurting my foot.”

“Kiss her.”

Stevie looked at me in despair, brushed my lips with his. He smelled like Double Bubble.

“I mean
really
kiss her. Use your tongue.”

Danny began to laugh. Horror crossed the face in front of me, then resignation, then inspiration. Stevie shut his eyes, stuck out his tongue and gave my face a long lick. I began laughing too.

Then it happened so fast. Stevie’s body squirming away and Matthew, in a full leap, blocking out the light, landing on me. The two of us rolling over and over. Danny’s expression floating somewhere: absolutely present, absolutely removed.

“Get off of me, or I’ll beat you bloody, you stupid ugly jerk!”

“No. No way. I’m going to kiss you.
French
kiss you. Get it, you stupid girl, you
twat.”

No.
My whole body was a no. I knew I could put up a pretty good vicious fight, but I was having trouble getting started. I felt exhausted. I actually seemed to be falling asleep suddenly.

“Hey, wake up!” He shook me. Then I felt his hands prowling in the region of my breasts, or what I referred to as my breasts. They were small, but disproportionately important to me. I kicked; I bit into his neck; I slugged full force into his jaw.

“Ow. Okay, bitch.”

We smashed at each other with our fists. I didn’t care that he was bigger—his size seemed a distinct advantage to me in my anger; there was so much more of him to hurt. There was a tiny part of me still asleep, but the rest fought without any style or self-presence, no sense of pain. Something wet wobbled over my top lip into my teeth. Gradually I recognized the taste of blood.

A fight is an intensely private world. We were revolving somewhere far into space; the fathers couldn’t have pulled us apart.

My mother’s voice behind the door: “Who do you blame? That’s right, drink some more, take another shot: I know who to blame.”

But there was no blame for his hand, unstoppable, inching up my thigh. And my hand pulling, pumping wildly, a snapped wing. I knew what I had to protect—I knew what was violently new between my legs. What had begun in pain that morning, what I had stopped with a rag from my pack, taboo.

I spit blood in his eyes. He twisted my thigh, I pounded a fist three times into his ear before he screamed and smashed back, poking fingers in my eye.

We were both crying. One eye shut, I felt wildly on the floor for the bottle. His hand was nearly at the entrance, the opening to the center of me. My bloody teeth left red tracks up his arm; I noticed them as I felt for the bottle with my free hand: somewhere behind him, somewhere to the right. My hand struck something metallic, not glass—just as his hand moved into position, pushed apart my legs, triumphant, the fingers opening the cloth, the zipper.

I was using the gun as a club before I realized I had it in my hand, then I became aware of movement in the tent: Stevie screaming out into the night, Danny somehow close by, but at a distance, all eyes. I saw my arm lifting the rifle against the light—just as his hand entered me.

He did it in such a leisurely fashion, with one hand. He reached behind with the other, like stretching, pulled the rifle effortlessly out of my hand. I saw the butt coming down and tried to duck, but the blow stunned every muscle in my face and laid my head to the side, as he used the gun like a broom, sweeping my face.

Then everything stopped. He’d pulled his hand, bloody from my jeans, and when I got my eyes working I saw that he held his hand frozen, a few inches from his face, staring. The rifle was propped against his other arm.

He looked at me, for the first time, straight on. I pulled the gun away and he grabbed for it halfheartedly. He was looking at me. I could feel his heart expanding, pounding; his eyes were in mine, no longer distracted. And as the lazy tug-of-war started and we began to move, rolling over each other, his eyes stayed right there looking into me. And when it happened, when the gun went off, I remember his expression was not surprised, although the physical had betrayed him into a new fear and awe, a pure chivalric hate, I think now, as I hold that body again in my imagination, as it shakes and shakes, dying, and I at last put my lips to his, kissing him.

DEAR LETTERS EDITOR,

At present I am living in an aquarium. Several months ago I noticed that scales were beginning to grow on my arms, and I went to a dermatologist who told me, after he’d looked at them through a microscope, that he’d only seen scales like these before on a Red Snapper.

It wasn’t long before the scales were all over my body and I started growing fins and a tail. Then I found that I had to put my head in the sink or soak it in the bathtub for hours. I was having lots of trouble breathing. One day I was at Crestwood Mall and I noticed an enormous wall-size aquarium in Pet World and I ordered one for myself. It’s somewhat restrictive, but I float a lot and blow bubbles … the weirdest thing about all this is: My husband just stands there and stares at me through the glass. He stands for hours; he smokes cigarettes; he has a can of beer. Sometimes he puts his head up against the glass and says, “Georgette, Georgette, I’m so sorry. Georgie, I’m sorry, Georgie.”

What I’m writing about, however, is this. I’d like to know if you would be interested in the story (firsthand account!) of a woman who has become a fish? I am out of the water enough each day to get it written down. I really feel that it is not your run-of-the-mill article. I worked at Macy’s, in Notions, for several years if you think that would make a better story. (Also, I feel that I don’t have much time because I am fairly certain that my husband is becoming a cat.) Please let me know as soon as possible. I am
not
a mermaid; I consider mermaids a sexist myth.

Sincerely,

Georgette Bell

I put the letter down and looked across to Page’s desk, but she was busily typing, talking into a phone held under her chin. That was the trouble, you had to interrupt people and make them listen to these things; you had to break through their normal preoccupations and introduce this spiky stuff: wronged misogynists, women who thought they were turning into fish; a man who was king of New Jersey. “But hey,” he wrote, “I’m a
fun
king.” They began to associate you with the material, the interruptees; they associated you with the twisted scenery.

Minnie White-White-Goldfarb padded by and dropped another U.S. Mail bag next to my
IN
box. She smiled. She was happy again; she and her fiancé had each agreed to drop a name. I smiled back at her.

“More letters from loonies!” she sang.

I looked hopefully at the canvas mail sack. After my speech at the editorial meeting and my conversation with Betty Berry, I’d found it harder than I’d thought to find publishable letters from crazies. They were either like the one from Fish-Woman, a missile with a target so specific and mysterious it was irrelevant finally, not very funny—or they were hostile, offensive, frightening as a face in the window at midnight. I’d stopped wearing my rabbit ears, but I still felt oddly split—half the time I wanted to start a bonfire in my
IN
box and the other half I felt like one of them.

I upended the sack and shook out part of its contents. Blue envelopes, fuchsia, rainbow, a postcard from Sarasota Springs, Florida, fluttered free—then a postcard with a photo front. Somebody had taken a picture of Holly Partz at a rally; she stood at an outdoor podium under the trees, her long blond hair blowing, smiling into the mike, her arm raised in a feminist salute. Unfortunately, someone had inked a mustache and beard on her face and had crudely drawn what looked like a three-foot dildo in her upraised fist—on the back of the card was written, “SIS finally figures out how to use it!” in purple marker. Under the card was a sodden-looking package, I poked at it, afraid of plastique, or worse, home-cooked food. Then a letter fell free whose return address I recognized.

Iris had chosen to write to me this time on stationery sporting a recurring pattern of small chartreuse blimps with a large green leprechaun in the margin waving a flag that said, “Top of the Mornin’ to Ya,” on it.