I reached down and diddled her the way she liked—the way she’d taught me—but she stopped me. “Dominick, I can’t just finish a seven-hour shift and . . . well, you know. And now I’m angry all over again at Daddy. I’m sorry. I’m just not in the mood.”
“What about me?” I said.
“What
about
you?”
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“Well, for starters, I drove down in the pouring rain to see you. I been waiting out in this friggin’ car for over four hours. Maybe I
am
in the mood.”
“Dominick, what was I supposed to do? Just tell my manager,
‘Oh, sorry, but my boyfriend decided to show up unexpectedly so I guess I can’t work the rest of my shift’?”
“No, you didn’t have to tell them that. All’s you had to do was act like you were at least half-glad to see me.”
“I
am
glad to see you,” she said. “I’m just keyed up. You know how I get working here. And then with this thing with my father. I mean, I
am
an adult, right? I
do
get to make my own decisions. But, God, when your mother finds your birth control pills—”
“Do me a favor, will you?” I said. “Just shut up about your parents!” The car filled up with silence.
After a while, I sat up and opened the door. Got out and went into the backseat. “Hey,” I said.
No response.
“Hey, you?” I tried again.
“Hey me what?”
“Come back here.”
She didn’t move for a minute or so. Then she climbed over the seat and into the back, flopped down next to me. Wrapped her arms across her chest, as tight as tourniquets. “As if
his
relationship with my mother is some kind of great model,” she said. “You should see the way she has to ask him for household money every morning at breakfast. She tells him what she needs, accounts for every penny, and then if he’s satisfied, he reaches into his wallet and counts twenty dollar bills into her hand. It’s disgusting.”
I fumbled at the opening of her pants, reached up inside her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra, but there was something covering her nipples. “What’s this?” I said.
“What?”
“This.” I took one of her breasts in my hand, rubbed my thumb where the nipple was supposed to be.
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show. That’s the last thing I’d need with the animals I wait on.”
I pulled up her shirt, peeled off the Band-Aids. Started kissing her breasts. If she wasn’t in the mood, well, I was horny enough for both of us. I shifted a little, got us both down onto the seat. I pried her legs apart with my knee, rubbed her a little.
“Hey, you know what, Dominick? I already told you, I’m just not . . .”
Shut up, shut up,
I thought, undoing myself. “I’m just too keyed up right now. I don’t feel like—hey,
stop
it!”
But stopping didn’t seem like an option. I’d been out in that car for hours. She owed me something. And she was right, now that I thought of it: how
dare
that rich fuck of a father tell her to aim her sights higher than me.
I started dry-humping her. Her not being wet seemed like a kind of stubbornness.
Stupid rich girl.
I reached down and grabbed myself, rubbed it against her.
I kissed her hard. “I fuckin’ love you,” I said. Kissed her again.
Pushed myself inside of her. She grunted a little. I heard her telling me to stop it—saying it hurt, that I was scaring her. But what
I
needed was stronger than her fear, and when she tried to get out from under me, I wouldn’t let her. “I love you,” I told her each time I hammered into her. “I
love
you. I
love
you. I
love
you.” But my head was filled with hatred: what right did Dessa’s fucking father have to assume he was better than
me
? . . . I might as well have been swinging that scythe out at the reservoir. Rattling that pinball machine down at Tepper’s Bus Stop. I only realized she was trying to fight me off when she
stopped
fighting. Just lay there and took the fuck.
The springs squeaked, the whole car rocked with what I needed, and then I came, cursing and clutching her, my one hand slapping the upholstery.
I was sorry before I was even soft again. Before I could even catch my breath. “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “That was intense. I guess I got kind of carried away.”
Dessa burst into tears. She was shuddering against my shoulders and chest.
“Hey, really. I’m sorry. I’d just been waiting out here so long.
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Drinking vodka and—” When I reached up to stroke the side of her face, she slapped my hand away. Punched me.
“I couldn’t help it, Dessa. I’m sorry. I just wanted you so bad, I got a little wild.”
“Shut up!” She punched me again. “Get off of me!”
I reached down to put myself back together again. Dessa did the same and climbed back in front.
“Is it really
that
bad?” I said. “That I went a little out of control because I wanted you so much?”
“You know what ‘wanting me’ like that is called, Dominick?” she said. “Rape.”
“Yeah, right. It’s not like you and me. . . . Look, I would never—”
“You just
did,
you jerk!” She started to cry again.
“Hey, hold on a second. That’s not fair.”
“I have had such a horrible week,” she said. “And now
this
happens.”
“Hey, you know what?” I said. “I’ve had a really horrible week, too. Did you ever think to ask
me
what kind of a week
I’ve
had?”
She started the car. “I’m going to drive you home,” she said. “Then I’m going to go home myself. Take a hot bath and wash off this little
‘experience’ we’ve just had. Just do me a favor, all right? Just stay in the back and don’t talk to me. Just don’t say anything.”
“You accuse me of raping you and I’m not even supposed to defend myself? Well, fuck that, Dessa! Fuck
you
!”
I got out of the car and slammed the door. Opened it and slammed it again. I started hoofing it away from her—out of the parking lot, onto the road. I jabbed my thumb at a passing car.
She rolled up next to me. The whirring sound of the power window was in my ear. “Come on. Let’s not do this, okay? Just get in and I’ll take you home. We both need to cool off and get some sleep.”
“Just
go,
” I told her. “You wouldn’t want a rapist in your car.”
“All right, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was a little strong. It’s just that after my last relationship, I’m kind of—”
I started screaming at her. “I am
nothing
like that guy! Don’t you
ever
. . . I am nothing like that guy at all!”
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The power window went whirring up again. She gunned it. Just drove away. That’s when I remembered my bike, stuck in her mother’s trunk like a dead body.
I got home two hours and three rides later—relieved, for once, to be back there. I walked through the dark house and up the stairs.
Dropped my clothes on the floor and climbed up into my bed.
When I rolled over, I heard crinkling paper. I lay on my back, squinting in the dark at whatever it was—trying to decide whether or not to get up and look at it. Another couple of minutes later, I had to take a leak anyway. I jumped down from the top bunk and made my way to the bathroom.
All these years later, I still remember what that note said. Can still
see
it, even—this weird version of his regular handwriting. He’d addressed it to
Dominick Birdsey, Traitor.
Do you think it’s easy having your sleep stolen every night? Do you
think it’s fun to feel the wings of the Holy Ghost fluttering against your
throat?
Sincerely,
One Who Knows
I stood there, squinting at it in the bathroom light, trying to make it make some kind of sense. He’s nuts, I told myself. Told it to the mirror in front of me. He’s fucking nuts. Then I balled up his stupid note, tossed it into the toilet, and pissed on it—pushed it around and around the inside of the bowl. Flushed it away.
I stayed awake until dawn, coming up with dozens of arguments about why I
wasn’t
a rapist. Why
not
being Thomas’s roommate was something I deserved.
I dozed off watching the first watery gray light coming through the venetian blinds.
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21
f
1969
It was after two the next afternoon by the time I woke up. My head ached. The room smelled sour. I reached down to scratch an itch and felt my own stiff jiz. The night before—what I’d done to Dessa—hit me like a fist in the gut.
“Hey?” I yelled down the stairs on my way to the bathroom. “Anyone home?” The silence was a relief. I needed to get on the phone with Dessa to repair the damage and didn’t want anyone overhearing me.
I stuck my face in the sink and splashed cold tap water, put my mouth to the faucet to sluice out the sour taste. Pissing into the toilet, I suddenly remembered that goofy note of my brother’s.
Do you
think it’s easy having your sleep stolen? Feeling the wings of the Holy
Ghost against your throat?
What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? First that typewriter crap. Then that stunt out there at the reservoir. . . . I got halfway under the shower, then got out again and went dripping down the hall and back to our room. I stood there, staring at Thomas’s unmade empty bed. What was going on?
340
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Back in the shower, soap and hot water helped wash away the night before. Dessa and I had just had a misunderstanding, that was all—a communications misfire. She usually wanted it as much as I did.
Maybe if I’d just slowed down a little. My bike in the trunk of her mother’s car gave me an opening. Maybe she could drive it over and we could talk—straighten things out. Pack a picnic and go out to the Falls, maybe, if we were both feeling in the mood. Undo the crap from the night before. God, I needed a car.
I wrapped a towel around myself and went into Ma and Ray’s room to use the phone. In the mirror above Ma’s bureau, I started shadowboxing with Dessa’s old boyfriends, letting punches fly at my own reflection. I dropped to the floor and did some push-ups. I was edgy. Couldn’t stop whistling. I told myself I was feeling good—feeling “up and at ’em”—but it was nerves. The fear that I’d blown it with the best person I’d ever known in my whole stupid, sorry life.
I dialed the Constantines’ number and waited. Looking around, I suddenly saw Ma and Ray’s bedroom the way Dessa might see it.
Her parents’ room was three times this size. It had wall-to-wall carpeting, a couch, a mural painted right onto the friggin’ wall. My mother and Ray had a worn linoleum floor and pull-down window shades, Ray’s collection of ceremonial weapons, Ma’s Holy-Roller stuff: crucifix, Mary statue, praying hands on this sorry little wooden shelf that Thomas had made in junior high shop class. The afternoon sun highlighted the dents in the wood where his hammer had missed, the nail hole he’d forgotten to wood-putty. In that same shop class, I’d made an end table with a built-in record rack to hold LPs. Mr. Foster had put it in the spring showcase where he put the best stuff. He’d placed a philodendron plant on top of it and some of his own records in the rack. My project gets put in the showcase, but what does Ma save? Put up in her bedroom? Thomas’s piece-of-shit shelf.
Why wasn’t Dessa answering? Where was she? . . .
I looked over at Ma’s holy picture of the Resurrection—Jesus, his Technicolor heart aglow, his eyes as forlorn as a basset hound’s.
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their bed. . . . I flashed on the long-ago day when she’d bought that thing, down at the five-and-ten. The same day that crazy guy on the city bus started touching her. Got off the bus when we got off and chased us. . . . I saw her sitting there on that bus seat across from us, scared to death, letting that guy’s hand wander wherever it wanted.
She’d acted the way she always did when anyone pushed her around: just shut up and took it. Waited for Jesus to come to her rescue. If it was true that the meek were going to inherit the earth, then Ma was going to be a Rockefeller.
I thought about a discussion our political science class had had the semester before: about whether religion was or was not “the opi-ate of the people.” . . . I hadn’t bothered going to Sunday Mass once since I’d gotten home from college for the summer. I was making a statement about who I was now—how I’d changed—so I stayed in bed every Sunday morning. It was a sore point with Ray, especially now that he’d been made a big-deal deacon down at the church. I was pretty sure it was a source of pain for Ma, too. Not that she ever said anything. Not that she’d risk
that. . . .
But, hey, it was
my
life, not theirs. Why go to church when God was just a big joke? A cheesy painting from the five-and-ten? I wasn’t going to be a hypocrite about it like Ray. . . . Thomas still went every week, of course.
Mr. Goody Two-shoes. Mr. Touched-by-the-Holy-Ghost. . . . I thought about Professor Barrett, my art appreciation teacher the semester before. Her and her abstract expressionism. She’d taken our class down to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. “Come
here
! Let me
show
you!” she’d said, leading me up the spiral to a wall full of drips and squibbles. She’d singled
me
out for some reason—had taken me by the arm and pulled me toward Jackson Pollock, her patron saint. “God is dead and Pollock knows it,” she’d announced out of the blue one day in class, her profile lit eerily by the dust-flecked cone of light between slide projector and screen. Sondra Barrett: according to the rumor, she was hot to trot. Got it on with both famous artists and undergraduates. Had she been coming on to me that day at the museum? Could I have pursued it? If Sondra Barrett ever got a load of my mother’s Jesus painting—fine art by I Know[340-525] 7/24/02 12:56 PM Page 343