Subject: fiction
Summer of Eternity
a work in progress
Paige Meredith
He's coming back this way. I don't have anything but my keys, which I guess could inflict some damage if I swing them or something, but that's the best I can think of. it's like my legs are cemented down, my head rigid, my throat {constricted and} all dry, my eyes and ears directly connected and alert. I can see colors, shapes, but not as parts on one another. Red blur, beige blur, round fist, huge black eyes like giant thumbtacks. Or jarts.
Usually I won't let anyone yards near me, whether it's that they need directions or the time or what. Someone approaches me, I'm off like a shot. I get this face on me, like a bulldog you fed horseradish or something. I'll cross the street, even. I'm a bitch on the street and it's an effective way to maneuver around, especially when you're scared as hell of the world. Somehow, this one caught me off guard, and before I knew it, had me dragged over here. It's amazing, too, because we're not three feet from where I was standing, all visible on the sidewalk. He must have done this here before, I keep thinking, because he knew the exact place where the cars driving by lose their line of sight as the grass gets taller. No one lives along this stretch of road, no one's anywhere on any side, and I'm watching myself up against a tree becoming some goddamn statue, like I'm the star in a feature film, like it's not me at all but some actress i'm watching while i'm sucking down raisinettes and sprite. What a novel rape scene, I'm thinking. How creative. He fucked her standing up. Three stars, for sure.
He'd knocked me down and kicked me in the ear and started walking away and zipping up his fly at the same time. he looked back, though, way too quickly, and saw that i wasn't unconscious after all, since as soon as he walked off I was wiping some blood and some of my own wet off my mouth, and he called me a fucking cunt for the eighth or ninth time. I had been set to run, but he turned back. With his medusa eyes. I'm paralyzed, and he's coming back this way. and as absolutely fucking sick as this sounds, at this point, after what just happened, it's almost like my head believes we have some kind of relationship or rapport going, though in what capacity i cannot imagine, and apparently there's a sick, sick, socialized part of me that's making me unable to turn and run. my face is wet and cold with his sweat and my snot. my thighs are wet with sperms and sweat, obviously both his, and i'm standing there and experiencing the world entirely through how things feel. And smell. the wet, the cold, the paralysis. no words, no logic, no presence of mind. but once he really starts moving toward me i guess my brain finally kicks in and i do the only thing i can think to do, i run into the middle of the street, and nearly get hit by a couple of cars, till one stops, cause the guy inside it notices that i'm bleeding down my legs, my head, my chest, and that i'm naked except for a bra hanging from one shoulder and my dress that i'm somehow dragging along, all bunched up onto my left ankle. There's blood in a streak from my ear down my chin, like the strap for a helmet. i'm probably in shock, cause i'm in the middle of the street, a two way street, dripping and naked, and not crying or anything, but just becoming a statue again, big eyes and hair like ropes, and watching myself do all this from somewhere in the balcony with the blue velveteen seats. I can't hear what the man is saying to me, but he puts his jacket around me, backward, so my front is fully covered, and I look like a mental patient, and he has me sit down on the passenger seat of his car with the door open over onto the curb. Medusa man is long gone by now; his sperm's all over my shoes. they're suede, so they're ruined.
I can suddenly hear, and someone, a voice from some tunnel, is there. I can only remember thinking what a stupid question - only much later did I realize that the answer would give her a gauge of just how mortified it would be appropriate to me. Thirteen, I tell her, then correct myself, since I've been fourteen for a couple of weeks. All I am is cold. I can't get warm. And i can't feel my toes, except somehow I know they're wet.
He made it look like a dance, maybe, was the idea, fucked me standing, punching up into me like gutting a fish, right down the middle. and the whole time his one hand's on my neck and the other on my mouth, and he's dancing into me, until he comes, with a steamy bleach smell, and then kicks me in the crotch just to tear up whatever's still whole.
We usually went to church on Christmas and when somebody died, and sometimes Easter if the weather was bad. The only other time I remember being in a church was for Bible day-care, where we cut out lambs and shepherds and stuck them on a big green board on the wall and learned how WE were those sheep, being guided by Him, though maybe not quite so furry as they were.
This one Sunday, though, Mama came into my room special, with a tray of breakfast (she hadn't even done that when I came home from the hospital - she insisted I eat at the table with my sisters like a Normal Person, even though she knew that it hurt me Down There to sit up for too long), and told me to eat up and put on my blue dress with the yellow collar that I had worn for school portraits back in September. Before I know it, we're in church. It'd been nine days - as soon as the bandage on my head was gone and my half-face wasn't as lumpy and purple-green and looked pretty much like everybody else's. I still had some bandaging on my ear, since the doctor had said I would have to have some surgery later on to make it look like a normal ear again. But once Mama put a hat on my head , you mostly couldn't see the gauze. I'd always thought that blue hat was so pretty, and she finally let me wear it - so that cheered my spirits a bit. It was also right around this time when Mama started letting me sit out on the porch again, and go get the mail or a pint of milk for baby Charles Calvin.
I was sitting in between Mama on my left, and Addie Loy on my right. Addie always wore this thick lavender perfume - The smell of her was making the start of a headache, right behind my nose. I kept thinking that, if I ever had the nerve to give her one of my famous back-handed compliments, it'd be something like, "My, Addie, don't you smell close." . It's all in the tone with things like that. She'd be pleased that someone had noticed. The reverend has an irritating habit of rubbing on his wedding band while he speaks - he does it so much that, after a while, that's the only thing you can concentrate on. He was saying how you can choose your destiny, that we are all weak men (I may be weak, and I may not be beyond an A cup just yet, but I'm sure as hellfire not a man), and we can, indeed, must, choose between the wicked and the true, the vengeful and the peaceful. He spat a lot, trying to get out all that passion that was in there, I guess. He was waving his head like a turkey, saying how we sin because we choose to sin, and we as sinners must hide ourselves away, because we commit two sins, yes TWO, if we not only sin but also allow others to be influenced by our wicked ways. He said how God does not allow his lambs to fall far, far into the canyon of despair, but just enough to test our faith, and then right back out again so that we may witness to those equally as troubled as we of the Father's compassion and devotion and light to guide us, if only we choose to see that light with our whole hearts. Bad things happen, he said, because our hearts are closed - we bring the sins upon ourselves and become wicked, vile, unfit.
Baby Charles Calvin was my closest companion that summer, before he got too old and realized he was supposed to hate his older sisters. Mama always called him her Happy Accident, and even to his face, which I thought was just plain wrong. Baby Charles Calvin didn't even have his own name - Calvin came from that religious guy Calvin, and Mama sort of explained to me who he was but I forget, and Charles was for Charles the Bubblegum Man. He used to go to Nevada with my daddy a long time ago, and one time my daddy had run plum out of money from gambling it all away. He'd told Charles that he suddenly felt pure Luck running through his veins, and could he possibly borrow twenty bucks for just this one blackjack round that my daddy had good suspicions about. Charles gave my daddy the money, and my daddy ended up winning the entire down payment for this yellow corner house where we still live now. Charles was the Bubblegum Man because that's what he brought every time he came over to see my daddy. You always had to guess Which Pocket, and if you were wrong, you still got a piece of bubblegum anyway, I guess because he felt like he had to give us something in return for making us think so hard about something as stupid as pockets. But if you were right, you got ten pieces of bubblegum and a kiss on the top of the head.
Baby Charles Calvin crawled a LOT - you couldn't take your eyes off him for even a second, cause he'd already be scooting away like a crab. Whenever it was my turn to watch him I would tie a rope around my own waist and then his, as I've never been real good at focusing on only one thing and not looking away.
My Mama interrupted me giving Jeremy Royster a blow job underneath the back porch when I was sixteen. I'd told him I was in dire straits with the calculus, and I'd do anything if he'd only help me out. So he did, and I did. Poor Jeremy - I got an 'a', and he ended up plum frustrated. I heard he got all blown just to bits in Vietnam - still a virgin. Man - a corpse with blue balls, flying home the hard way.
Me and Jeremy, man, we were together all the time the year I was seven. We used to sit outside in the summer, eating those red candy wax lips from the dairy mart, or biting the tops off the wax 'bottles,' and pouring the syrup down our throats. Or he'd but one of those candy rings, so shiny you'd think it was a ruby, and ask me to marry him, all serious and wistful, while I'd sit there, doing my best to look utterly bored, playing with my little grass bouquet. We had boxes of old clothes that my mom collected to give to the 'More Unfortunate,' and we'd put shoes on our hands and feet and pretend we were dogs. Sometimes one of the boxes had someone's old, scratched-up briefcase, and then we'd be dog businessmen, dog lawyers, and one of us would get our shoes shined by the other, who was, of course, the dog shoe-shine-boy. We'd be batman - both of us were batman cause we didn't want to fight about it - there was no yelling allowed. We'd fly down the sidewalk in our big wheels, trying to catch the bad guy, only we'd never said exactly who or what the bad guy was - it was just something nebulous and incontrovertably bad, and at the same time something so clear, like an inside joke, that you'd never even try to explain to anyone else. Usually, when the ice cream man came, he had a quarter and I had no money at all. He'd still go get a bomb pop, and eat it real slow, right in front of me, blue watery juice staining the front of his shirt like a Rorschach inkblot. But he'd always save me the white part and give it to me when he was done with the rest. Everyone knew the white part was the best part of the whole bomb pop, and even though most of it had melted to nothing by the time he'd hand it to me, it was still the nicest thing he could have done in the nicest way he could have done it. It was like neither of us were denying that he had a quarter and I didn't, but he wasn't babying me or treating me different just because of that. He was just being nice to his friend. We'd play doctor and he'd look down my shirt for some exotic disease, and then pronounce me terminal. One time I came outside, came running out of the house while my parents were screaming about something, so loud the walls would echo in my ears. He saw how cruddy I felt, and went and got a couple of pinecones. He jumped out at me with the pinecones sticking out of his ears and chased me down the block. And the whole time while I was running down the block away from him, and even while he was chasing me back up the other way, I totally forgot all the screaming. Maybe it was just for a couple minutes, but still it was a good thing. He could always find the yellow clovers - four-leaf ones were no big deal, because they were all over the place if you looked right, but yellow ones were much more rare and much more lucky. He would hunt up a whole bunch of them and walk up to me and throw those yellow clovers down at my cupped hands, while I laughed up at him from my seat on the curb. One time we found this little chipmunk that had been run over by a car. He let me help him wash it into the sewer with his hose. The street underneath still looked kind of maroon from all the blood, but it was a much easier thing to look at than chipmunk gut stew. No one wanted to look at the chipmunk splattered uselessly all over the asphalt, the whole mess getting flatter and greyer as more time passed, a bit more being washed away with every rainstorm, enough remaining behind that you would say 'yuck' every time you saw it, but eventually not enough left that you would know what it originally had been if you didn't already know. A slow reminder of the guts splattered all over - what a waste - neither of us wanted to see that. Washing it away was the best thing because no one wants to look at a mess - seeing it once keeps it plenty fresh in your mind, for sure.
Jeremy didn't like baby Charles Calvin because he said baby Charles Calvin was 'full of snot.' Of course, it was pretty much true - his nose ran almost all the time, even his eyes ran, and I swear that kid never stopped crying. Before that child learned to talk, I think he got snot on every single piece of clothing I owned. If I were baby Charles Calvin, though, I'd never stop crying either. He didn't ask to be born and tied up with a rope to the porch. Jeremy did like to terrorize the kid, though. He sit him in the wagon and send him downhill. He'd let go just at the point when it was too late to stop it. Looking back, we were pretty damn lucky that the whole thing didn't turn over and kill the kid.
Sometimes it comes like a fog, creeping about me bit by bit until I all of a sudden see that I'm surrounded. But unlike fog or mist, it can't be waved or blown away - it hangs, cloying. It sticks to my eyes. The pressure is unbearable.
I've never been a pretty girl, though I've been told that I clean up nicely when I want to. I guess it would be hard to want more than that. There is a benefit to being plain at times. You can sneak up on life and only announce yourself when you are exactly prepared. Does wonders for men, too -- what man could resist a woman who changes right to beautiful and back again? The second he thinks he's got plain me, I turn and then blam. He can fall into lust right over again. blam. I am a hundred women and I pay my own way. And I just have to laugh, cause a lot of guys think they've found The Only True Pearl Left once I've whipped out that wallet. What a simple and amazing thing. Good thing the really beautiful ones never discovered my secret.
Do you know when I knew I was for certain and real in love with this one? It's when he took me over to his house and deposited me on his couch like so many groceries. And I sat there searching around -- I had never seen carpet so white and springy or ceilings so high, a fridge with no frost, black and white photography, sparse, modern furniture. No dust at all. I knew I could love a man who owned a house like that.
Eventually we got to bed, which was half unplanned, since I had forgotten my housekeys and had nowhere to stay till morning when the super would let me in. I had left those stupid keys just sitting right there on the counter -- I guess I get distracted a lot. So he offered, since any chivalrous man not insane would have done so, and even though he hadn't the boldness to so much as kiss my cheek earlier in the night, the darkness made him brave -- which is something I notice pretty regularly about men. I was there the whole time with my squirmy noises, scratching his back and marveling at just how high a cathedral ceiling actually is. And believe me, there was not a single cobweb in that room.
I've noticed that men actually prefer if you don't talk much to them, or at least use a lot of ambiguous phrases, I guess. This way they can project onto you the kind of woman you'd end up being if they were actually molding you from dough. The best thing is just to answer when asked. And always answer yes. You can talk with your eyes and moon at them, pretend they're handsome, fawn all over them, grabbing their arm and acting like your legs suddenly have no bones, as if your feet were bound and they were the only possible means of support strong enough to keep you off the ground. And keep your hands clasped on him like a big old crab.
If he starts being touchy or weird, just disappear on him. There are a thousand just like you -- he won't have a difficult time replacing you at all. But watch which bridges you burn -- the touchy ones usually end up being the better catch. They're hard to tolerate at times, but when they're apologetic, you can have damn near anything in the world if you'll just take them back, that one more time.
This one's new. A week ago I met him and I've seen him four times; it would have been five but I wanted to be mysterious a little, you know how that goes. He's a sweet boy, a good eight years younger than I am and still all amazed at the world. But he's sorely mistaken if he thinks he's the love interest in this film for longer than six weeks, tops. I guess it's the difference between tv dinners and your very own mama's sensible, if mushy and grey, Sunday meal.
Those young boys taste different, all salt and cologne (something too expensive but with an edge of cheap), and semen somehow more bitter and slimier so it sticks, cloying, right at the top of your throat, for hours after.
Sometimes i just feel so disconnected from the world, and I simply hate everybody. And I don't think I'll ever come to comprehend real security. Trust. Calm.
I have never had calm. I imagine it's a time when everything in your gut and your ears just stops whirling, just for a moment. Like putting the conch shell to your ear and actually focusing enough to hear it - the swirling echo of the sea that's not really there.
I don't trust any of the men I see. It's something that I think a lot of women do, present a false trust - a trust that the world can touch and identify - but there's always a place deep inside - the genuine you, the pearl , that's never given over. That's the trick, then. Being able to present that pearl to someone and knowing with all your soul that they'll cherish it and take it on faith, and not stick it between their teeth to feel whether it's gritty with passion and the sticky coatings of time, they'll not put it between their pointy little teeth, possibly crushing it to bits. It takes years, decades to make a pearl. And only the one you can trust understands just how fragile something built up from layers can be. The pearl is the layer cake of the soul. But one loud bang, and it'll fall. You can't unfall a cake. Maybe you can prop it up with toothpicks, and from a distance it'll surely look like a solid and edible thing, but closer up, obviously the little nubs of wood are gonna be poking right through. That'll give you away every single time.
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