Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls(33)
Hi, Cousin Cindy, I say, but she can’t place exactly who I am to her, where she knows me from, why I’m even here.
When I’m in high school, Cousin Cindy tells me and Grandma Sitchie she’s a cam girl these days. She keeps her toddler son in the other room while she talks sweet to men around the world, crawling toward the blinking light on her computer, pulling her straps down, waiting for the money. This is how she explains the new job over dinner. She enjoys telling our grandma the details.
That’s a whore thing to do, says Grandma. You should be more like your cousin, she says, just look at her. She looks at me. Cousin Cindy looks, too. Homely as a toad but not a whorish thing about her.
Thank you, is what I say.
If only I could combine the two of you—
We know, says Cousin Cindy.
Who’s the father of this kid of yours anyway? Where’s the fella? Isn’t he brown?
He’s Italian.
He looks like a terrorist.
I make bank with my cam work; I even bought a new body.
And what about your son, Cindy? Your SON.
Pass the butter? I say.
There goes Cousin Cindy again. She’s on her cam, eyes black and clouded over as frozen grapes. Tonight, she gives her shoes a plug over the cam, They’re comfy, and on sale!, spreading her legs into a V, holding her boots by the ankles.
Her name on this site is Beach Miztress. There are two columns beside the cam box, “Will Do” and “Won’t Do” (Pussy, Anal, Toys, Lesbian, Group, Dom, Sub, Dance, Private), and a scrolling chat box of usernames and cartoon coins.
Cousin Cindy turns her back to the camera so the chatroom men can watch as she unhooks her bra. She’s got a large cactus tattoo with neon colors above her ass, Desert Dream etched in cursive on the cactus’s arm because Cousin Cindy was born out there, in Arizona. She had a life, other than this one. A childhood on red sand; a stepfather who—it’s been said—hurt her for years in the dark. She was once just a girl who played with action figures. A girl with scabbed knees and teen idols sticky-tacked her wall, a kid who just wanted to get out.
Mr. Big, are you there? she says.
I’m here, I type.
You want to see me put this tentacle in my ass? She holds up a rubber Octopus toy with suction cups. She sucks on it for us.
No, I type. I want to talk to you about politics. Who was your favorite president?
That’s a whacky fetish you got there, Mr. Big. She stares right into the camera, pinching her nipples, looking confused.
Shut it with the politics, Mr. Big. Are you a fucking fag? The other men in the chatroom type furiously, one after the next.
List one favorite president, I type. One policy. Anything.
I’m t-t-t-thinking, Cousin Cindy stutters a bit—her nervous habit.
Can you not list a single president? You fucking moron?
I want her to be humiliated. I want her to pull a sweatshirt over her head, focus her pupils, snap her laptop closed. In this moment, more than anything, I want to see Cousin Cindy cry.
I don’t see why you care, she says, forcing a giggle. We’re not here for that!
She’s right! the men type. On with the tentacle, please!
Prove me wrong, I type. Just one.
Can’t it be enough, she says, looking straight through my screen, to be quiet and love you?
CAN I PET YOUR BACK?
Something happened when I got to high school: I found pretty. I found pretty in my slick of teeth, the metal brackets popped off with pliers, the sticky strips of bleach in my mouth. I found pretty in emerald contact lenses, and the squares of tinfoil that sucked the dark right out of my hair. I found pretty in the tanning salon; Playboy bunny stickers arranged on my hips; that blue scream of light baking my naked body. I found pretty in thick foundations that smeared away my freckles, and in inch-long tubes of Styrofoam secured to my eyes for a lash perm. Pretty in the leather seats of high schoolers’ cars and in the back rows of movie theaters and on MTV; I found pretty on the Internet. I found pretty in a stranger named Lennox Price, queen of Fort Lauderdale, in the way she’d document her life on Myspace, her lonely car rides, her breast augmentation, her fishnet tops, the way she drizzled liquor down the mouths of men in the club scene. I found pretty in the plastic clamshell cases of pills—for regulation, not for sex—that bloomed my chest to a size C. I found pretty in acrylic nails and Abercrombie & Fitch and scratch and sniff G-strings on plastic hangers, pretty when I threw my riding clothes away—the breeches, then the boots—because I had been looking too fat to be a jockey too fat for show jumping too fat for the Olympics too fat too curvy too woman too soft (how many more times can a body betray you?). I found pretty in a homecoming Duchess crown, in the wave of my hand from the convertible car creeping around the football field because I was Most Changed—I was that kind of pretty. I found pretty in boys calling me hot. I found pretty in calling girls hot. I found pretty in calling girls fat. I found pretty in calling girls sluts. Girls. I found pretty when the same boy who once asked, Are you a goat? Can I pet your back? didn’t recognize this new version of me, and asked to jerk off into my eyes. I found pretty in the feeling of a razor nicking the hair off my calves, my arms, my back, my pussy, my stomach, my nipples, my sideburns, my armpits, my big toes, my fingers, my neck, my chin, until my skin buzzed with a smooth purity. I found pretty when I dreamed of being raped under bridges and being raped (while drowned) in a Jacuzzi and being raped in Temple and being raped in the gym locker room because I should feel lucky, I guess, being pretty enough for that. I found pretty in Skylar Fingerhut and her summer nose job and chin job and cheek job and all those oozing bandages, like nebulas on gauze, how she invited me over for the first time, let me lift a straw of chicken broth to her mouth as she healed, saying, Symmetry, that’s the key to all this pretty, and I felt as if I were fanning Cleopatra herself. I found pretty in telling my mom to stay in the car at the pickup line, and in the way neighborhood boys beat her hummingbird mailbox with golf clubs, slowly, so that one wing dangled, then both, then the beak; now, only the body is left. I found pretty in the swirl of my lunch from my mouth into toilet bowls, and in the spots of light I’d see when I’d blink away hunger. I found pretty in clavicles, in the nose ring I’d get while I watched a new friend have a needle shoved through the hood of her cunt. I found pretty in the cast of the Real World and in Carmen Electra, pretty on Chinese New Year, my family dressed in red, picking at the cheeks of a snapper, the way I could shift the food around my plate and go somewhere else behind my eyes and say, I’m not like you, I’m prettier than this. I found pretty in my C grades, then Ds, in new classes with no Honors, in the word expulsion. I found pretty in stupid. I found pretty when my father began referring to me as daughter instead of son when he got a call to move to New York, get out of town. The way he said, You’ll be fine staying here, growing up this way. You’re already such a good woman.