The Brutal Language of Love (4 page)

I told Jennings that Garrett was in my math class and he said he knew since the two of them had kept in touch after Garrett's expulsion. Apparently he had gone on to spend time in a juvenile home, where a therapist suggested it was his mother he hated and not me, and that my weight had simply provoked him into attacking me because his mother was fat, too.

“Is that true?” I asked Jennings as we walked down the street together one fall morning. The dewy air reminded me of lying in the tub with him after sex, when the mirrors were all fogged up and the whole place smelled like a greenhouse. It wasn't something I would do again, but the memory of it made me think I had made the right choice at the time.

“Absolutely,” Jennings said, pulling the choke chain on his mutt, Robbie, while Edna, my miniature terrier, looked on in horror. “He feels just terrible about the mix-up.”

“So that's it? He's cured?” I said.

Jennings nodded. “Probably even more so now that you've lost all this weight.”

Edna sidled up to a Cutlass Supreme, sniffed the back tire, then peed beside it. When she was finished, Robbie peed on top of her pee. Jennings and I watched without saying a word. Bodily fluids were of little consequence to the likes of us. “Well, he's good in math,” I said finally, offering what little evidence I had of Garrett's reform.

Jennings turned to me then and dangled the end of Robbie's leash in my face. “You are getting very sleepy,” he warned.

“What?” I said.

“Your eyelids are getting very heavy,” he continued. “Soon you will fall asleep.”

“Stop it, Jennings,” I said, walking ahead.

He gave up and fell in step beside me. “Sorry, Roz. It's just that Garrett asked me if I would hypnotize you so you'd have sex with him in the girls' rest room.”

“I see,” I said, panicking slightly at the thought of being sold again.

“He says he won't hurt you if you say no, but if you just give him a chance he thinks he could make you feel really good.” He put a hand in his pocket then to hide the erection he had gotten.

“I don't do that anymore,” I said weakly.

“Why not?” Jennings asked, surprised. “I do.”

I shifted my gaze from his crotch to his face. “With who?”

He shrugged. “Different girls.”

“Well,” I said, feeling suddenly morose, “hypnotism doesn't work anyway.”

“Sure it does,” he said. “Just look at you.”

I looked at Edna instead, who was digging a small hole in Jennings's front yard, where we had ended up, while Robbie sniffed her butt. From her kitchen window, I could see Ms. Jennings peering out at us; I didn't have to look at my own house to know my mother was at her post as well. “Spell
hypnotism,
” I said to Jennings for old times' sake, and he did so incorrectly, replacing the N with an M. We began to laugh, and in an instant his mother was at the front door, calling her son inside.

The next day in math class I felt a tug at the back of my hair. It was painless and affectionate and I dared not turn around.

“Yes?” Mr. Alvarez said a few minutes later, looking over my head at Garrett, who presumably had his hand up.

Garrett cleared his throat. “May I please go to the rest room?”

Mr. Alvarez nodded and Garrett got out of his seat to collect the wooden hall pass on the teacher's desk.

I waited as long as I could before asking permission to use the rest room as well.

“No,” Mr. Alvarez said. “Wait until Garrett comes back.”

“But I can't wait,” I said. “I have to go
now.
”

This was a new liberty we girls had begun to take in high school, meaning we would not be responsible for bleeding all over the classroom floor should our teachers not take heed. I had gotten my first period a month after Jennings and I stopped making love, and though I didn't have it that very day, Mr. Alvarez nodded knowingly and filled out a paper pass.

In the rest room I waited for another girl to wash her hands and leave before checking all the stalls. Garrett was in the last one, standing on the toilet seat.
“Alcatraz,”
he said softly. His voice was deeper than it had once been, his erection more forthright. He would not swim around inside me like a fish.

I stepped inside the stall and locked the door behind me. I had always been too afraid to scrutinize him before—even that time at Jennings's when we exchanged ideas about the end of the world—and so now I couldn't help but take him in. It seemed a kind of miracle that we should be so close without harm passing between us.

“Alcatraz,”
he mentioned again after a short while, to remind me of why I was there, but he needn't have. It would be years before I would stop feeling grateful for my safety, before I would notice the ache in my tailbone warning me of unworthy men or bad weather.

For now, my only concern were the bulging blue-green veins running along his muscular forearms. As I held my breath and reached out to touch one of them, it quivered, like Edna's twiggy back legs when she was cold. I gripped the arm and used it to steady myself as I stepped up onto the toilet, where I found his cheek to be prickly and the bottoms of his earlobes like feathers between my fingertips. The hair was still yellow, and when I put my face into it and inhaled, the answer was gardenia. I held both forearms now, though I could not remember when I had taken the second one, and they gripped me protectively in return. The lips were wet and frightened as they came toward me, while inside the mouth, the teeth made tentative, idle threats.

In 1960 I was one of the few people I knew
who owned a bikini. They had been around for a while but were still considered fairly risqué. Mine was pink, made of cotton, and tied around the neck. The bottoms were nothing like the ones you see today, cut so high they seem to be missing their backs. Mine were like a pair of briefs, which was daring enough for 1960—just about the limit.

The bikini was the perfect invention for me, as I liked being naked and tried to go without clothing as often as possible. In my apartment it was easy: I could take off my clothes whenever I felt like it. In public, of course, it was harder. Sometimes the best I could do was to not wear socks. It wasn't as if I was trying to show anything off (I didn't really have anything to show). It was more to do with feeling of a piece: waistbands seemed to cut me in half; I couldn't feel my hands beyond my cuffs.

“Put some clothes on, Vanessa,” my older sister, Allison, would say when we were growing up. We shared a room, so Allison saw me naked a lot. If you'd asked me the color of her eyes back then, I couldn't have told you, for all the time she spent averting them. Allison was a prude. She always wore pajamas to bed, wouldn't talk about sex, and turned her back when she got dressed in the morning so I wouldn't see her breasts. It was the way most of the girls in the locker room at school acted, and it made me feel like we weren't sisters.

I tormented Allison with my nudity. Even in winter, when the upstairs was the coldest part of our house, I'd lie naked on top of my sheets, waiting for her to finish brushing her teeth. She'd always give a small start when she saw me, then quickly turn out the light. “I'm still naked, you know,” I'd say after a few minutes in the dark.

Then Allison got pregnant while she was still in high school. My parents sent her to live with an aunt in New Jersey, and I had the bedroom all to myself. I thought about Allison a lot after that. To me, she was still a prude. If she hadn't been so uncomfortable with her body, she would've gotten herself some rubbers at the drugstore or something. I knew what happened to her would never happen to me, and it never did.

Allison didn't come home. She gave the baby up for adoption and got a job as a secretary in Manhattan. Meanwhile, I finished high school and got a scholarship to an all-girls college in upstate New York. The idea of my going to an all-girls school seemed to alarm Allison. She wrote me several letters explaining the difficulties of meeting men “on the outside,” as she put it, and urging me to attend a coed college and meet “the cute and cuddly ones” while I still could. It meant a lot to me that she bothered to stay in touch, so I gave her letters some thought. In the end, I came home and enrolled in Syracuse University's School of Journalism.

Shawki and I started dating the spring of my junior year. He was an exchange student from Alexandria, brilliant not only in his field, economics, but in everyone else's, as well. He knew American politics better than we Americans did, and when any of us needed to check our facts on the Middle East we skipped the library altogether in favor of lunch with Shawki. He convinced us all that the Israelis should get out of Palestine, that the fundamentalists didn't care about Egypt's antiquities, and that the only proper way to drink tea was in a glass with lemon. Everyone wanted Shawki to come to their parties. Though his English was only so-so, he wasn't shy about mingling, and his intensity never prevented him from having a good time. He'd argue heatedly while wearing pointed party hats on either side of his head. He eagerly shared the recipe for his secret fava-bean dip.

In private Shawki was sweet, removing his glasses and turning away when I took off my clothes—not because he disapproved, as Allison had, but because he didn't know what else to do. “You are the first woman of me,” he confessed shyly, and I smiled to fill the empty space he left for my confession, made years earlier to a boy named Joel in high school.

After we had been dating awhile, I wrote to Allison saying, “He's not cute and cuddly but will brilliant and sophisticated do?” I thought she would write back with something like, “That's even better,” or, “Could you find one for me?” But I didn't hear from her at all until a couple of months later, when she called me out of the blue. “Is he there?” she whispered as soon as I picked up the phone.

“Allison?”

“Is he there?” she whispered again.

“Who?” I asked.

“I can't pronounce his name. Your friend.”

“Shawki?”

“Yes. Is he there?”

I glanced around my apartment. I knew Shawki wasn't there, but the way Allison was whispering made me feel as if I were missing something. “No,” I said.

“Good.” She was speaking in her normal voice now. “I need to talk to you in private. I think you're making a mistake.”

“What did I do?”

“I think you should date someone American.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Allison laughed. “Don't act like you don't know, Vanessa. Don't act like you live in some separate world from the rest of us. You'll ruin your reputation, for godssakes. You'll never get married.”

I looked around my apartment again. My print of van Gogh's
Starry Night
was hanging somewhat askew, and I reminded myself to fix it later. I said, “I guess I should expect that from someone who doesn't even have a college degree.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. I stared at
The Starry Night
and tried to straighten it with my mental powers, cocking my head in the direction I wanted it to go.

“He's not black, is he?” Allison asked finally. “Is he a black man?”

“No,” I said, “he's light brown.”

“Well, at least there's that.”

I started to cry a little. Tears dripped into the holes of the telephone receiver, and for a second I wondered if I could get electrocuted. “Don't call me anymore,” I said.

That night when Shawki and I made love, he asked if he had been my first. “Yes,” I whispered in his ear, “of course.” As soon as I said it, I was sorry. I had meant to give him something out of love, but instead it came out sounding like charity:
Of course I'd give my womanhood to you, a black man.
From that moment on, I couldn't stop feeling I had something to prove.

By summer, things had changed. Shawki had taken
to going through my closet and dividing the clothes into two sections: those he liked and those he didn't like. These soon became the clothes I should wear with him and the clothes I should wear by myself; then, simply, the clothes I should and shouldn't wear. His least favorite item was a summer top with straps that tied over each shoulder. “Someone can pull the string and you will be exposed immediately,” he explained, moving it to the Shouldn't side. I nodded gravely from my bed.

Still, I didn't break up with him. His distaste for exposed skin reminded me of Allison, which was vaguely comforting. I wore the shirt with the shoulder ties more and more, always leaving one of the strings loose so that it would eventually come undone. I mixed up the Shoulds and Shouldn'ts so that each time Shawki came over he had to reorder my closet. I spilled food on the Shoulds and shrank them in the dryer. I missed my sister.

That summer, Shawki built a small sailboat from a kit. He painted the hull gold and stenciled
NEFERTITI
in black letters on the prow, along with a freehand ankh. It was a one-man boat, really, but Shawki was sure we could both fit. “You are skinny,” he told me. “It will be such that you are not really there.”

We took the boat to Skaneateles Lake one Saturday to try it out. The public launch was just off East Lake Road, down a dirt path lined with weeds and trees. We drove down to the shore, unloaded the sailboat from the roof of Shawki's Fiat, then parked up the hill a ways, next to a station wagon with an empty boat trailer attached. Shawki got out of the car and examined the trailer. Patting it, he said, “Someday I will get one.”

I wore my pink bikini under my shorts and T-shirt. Shawki had pronounced it a Shouldn't as soon as I'd bought it and had quickly stuffed it into the pocket of a pair of “too-tight” jeans. I took it out after he left and put it in my underwear drawer, where it brightened up all the whites and beiges. I wore the top as a bra when I knew Shawki and I would make love, and was gratified by the flash of anger that passed over his face before he quickly untied it and pulled it off me.

But today would be the first time I had worn the bikini in public. While Shawki was down by the shore raising the sail, I took off my shorts and T-shirt and tossed them in the back of the Fiat. I thought about taking off my sneakers, then remembered something Shawki had said about needing traction on a boat and changed my mind.

“Go back and put your clothes,” he said when he saw me coming toward him.

I nodded and went back and got my sunglasses from the glove compartment. “How's that?” I asked when I returned.

He looked away.

“C'mon, Shawki,” I said. “It's kind of funny.”

He wouldn't look at me.

Shawki's mood changed once we got on the water. It turned out he was a pretty good sailor. He had never sailed before, but had read a book about it, which was just about all Shawki ever needed to do. We skimmed along the bright green lake, our sail cracking, the boat's fiberglass body showing no signs of springing a leak. Shawki slowed when we passed a house along the shore that he particularly admired. “How about that one?” he asked, shielding his eyes from the sun and pointing to a log cabin. “I take that one.”

“It's okay,” I said. I had tried hard all my life not to be too impressed with Skaneateles. I loved the lake, but the wealthy town perched on its shore I could do without. When I was little and we had out-of-town guests, my parents had always brought them here—as if where we lived on Syracuse's north side wasn't good enough. “Welcome to paradise,” Allison would mumble each time we smelled cow dung on the trip out—which was often—and we'd giggle in our corners of the back seat.

Shawki and I sailed toward the village of Skaneateles, a strip of shore bordered by shops and a lengthy pier. We had done well so far, managing to avoid the other boats on the lake. A race had approached at one point but Shawki had maneuvered us out of their path, calmly instructing himself in Arabic under his breath. He was becoming accustomed to the two-handed job of steering and controlling the position of the sail; my only job was to move out of the way when he wanted to put the sail where I was sitting.

I had just twisted my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck when three young men whizzed by us in a boat twice the size of ours, whistling and yelling, “Hey, hot stuff!” They were all shirtless and the one who yelled the loudest wore a captain's hat. Shawki tried to steer us away from them but he needn't have bothered; they were going much faster than we were and disappeared as quickly as they had come upon us.
Nefertiti
rocked a bit in their wake. Shawki stopped steering and let the sail go slack, leaving me to focus on the water sloshing over the edge of the boat and onto my sneakers.

“I wish to return,” Shawki said suddenly.

“Why?” I asked.

“I'm tired,” he said. “Ready about!”

“What?”

“I told you in the car—ready about!”

It was true: he had told me in the car. This was sailing jargon and it meant I was supposed to do something. I just couldn't remember what.

“Tell me in regular language,” I said, “just this once.”

“Ready about!” Shawki insisted. Then he said, “Hard-alee!” and hit me with the sail.

It didn't really hurt, but I was balanced so precariously on the side of the boat that it knocked me into the water. When I surfaced, I found my plastic sunglasses floating beside me. “Jesus,” I said. The lake was deep and so stayed very cold, even in summer. I briefly wished for a maillot, thinking it might've quelled the sting of water on my belly.

Shawki was sailing away from me. He had turned the boat around—I now remembered what “ready about” and “hard-a-lee” were supposed to signal—and was heading back toward the launch. There was no point in panicking or calling out to him; he was just trying to scare me. I knew he would eventually come back, and he did.

What I didn't know was that he wouldn't stop. Instead, he coasted by and yelled at me, “Get up!”

I reached for the boat, but there was nothing to grab onto—no hooks, no indentations, nothing. My hands slipped right off the fiberglass. “How am I supposed to—” I hollered after him, but he wasn't listening, and since I was almost out of breath from treading water in my sneakers, I stopped calling.

He made a second pass. This time he slowed down a little, as if to be helpful. “Get up,” he said again. I reached for the boat halfheartedly. Mostly I kept my eyes on him. By the time my hands slid off, I had been dragged a couple of feet.

On the third pass I just watched him go by. He didn't tell me to get up and I didn't try.