Trust Exercise(67)
This was where things stood when Karen, one day toward the end of her shift, came out from the storeroom and saw Martin standing there on the far side of the fluorescent-lit case. She was thoroughly surprised and embarrassed. She had seen plenty of Martin at CAPA but she had never yet spoken to him, marginal as she was, socially unnoticed as she was. She was mortified that Martin should know she spent afternoons here, pumping excrement-resembling fro-yo into stale waffle cones. The previous year, when she’d just turned fifteen, Karen had gone to a “lock-in” at church and made out with a boy who ground his crotch against her bare thigh so hard he abraded her skin, and afterward a girl ridiculed her for having “carpet burn” in the wrong place. That was Karen’s sexual experience to date. Coming out of the storeroom and seeing Martin, Karen assumed he was there by coincidence. She assumed he must like frozen yogurt. When he said he was there to see her, she might have literally let her mouth hang open from shock. But then, all was made clear. “The girls put me up to speaking to you, about how you won’t give them rides,” he said. Karen hadn’t even finished flushing with confused pleasure that he was there to see her when all her blood had to change gears and instead flush with angry humiliation.
But then he yanked the lever in the other direction. “I told them to sod off. You’re not their bloody chauffeur. I told them, ‘If you can’t even stay in the houses where you were assigned, you can’t throw a fit about not getting rides.’”
“You said that?” exclaimed Karen.
“I very nearly didn’t bring them on this trip. Should’ve known they’d be terrible guests. So this is your country’s best yogurt, is it? Should I try some?”
Just like that he brushed off the girls and put himself on her side. Karen served him a cone of the fro-yo, which she had subsisted on her first weeks on the job and which now made her gag even when she just smelled it. She waved him off when he tried to pay for it. By now her co-worker had come from the back, tying his apron in place. Her shift was over. “How did you get here?” she asked when they walked out together. He’d already finished the cone. The crumbly little strip mall parking lot was empty apart from her own and her co-worker’s cars.
“I walked.” Martin shrugged.
“You walked? Nobody walks.”
“I did. It took a long time, too. I hope I don’t have to walk back.”
“So now I’m your chauffeur.”
Martin grinned, roguish. “Gives me a clever idea. I’ll tell the girls you can’t drive them because you’ve got to drive me. That way they can’t be angry at you.”
“I don’t care if they’re angry at me,” Karen lied.
“But I care.”
Skip ahead. Imagine Karen made witty, by the attention of this witty man who assumes that she somehow is witty, like him. And she is! Or at least, with him, believes herself to be. Imagine the driving around. Day after day there are hours and hours of driving around. Avoiding the vengeful girls, her outmaneuvered mother, is a game they automatically win, just by forming a team. Karen shows Martin all the places in her town she thinks are special. Martin does not make her feel na?ve at her failure to notice that every one of these places is located in a corporate park. It’s that kind of town, possessed of only artificial beauty, manmade “ponds” spanned by poured-concrete bridges underneath which the water glows a blinding ghastly green from spotlights magically submerged but somehow not electrocuting the resident ducks. Topiaries cut into the shapes of the letters which spell out the name of the multinational conglomerate whose headquarters are surrounded by these hedges and ponds cast impenetrable shadows on the closely clipped, comfortable grass. Overhead, at the top of the corporate tower, a beacon swings in circles, all night long, as if there were a coast some where within a thousand miles, and ships to warn. Beneath Martin’s body, Karen’s body comes alive the way it never has before, not at the “lock-in” when the boy scraped the skin off her thigh with his denim-clad hard-on, not under the covers while reading the dirty parts in The Thorn Birds and poking herself. Possibly it would have made no difference if it had been Martin or if it had been her yogurt-place co-worker whose name history fails to preserve. Possibly first love, despite all the fuss, is only mating with ideas attached. Martin, retrospection shows us, was scrawny, smelled and tasted like an ashtray, and had yellow nails, yellow teeth, and yellowish whites-of-the-eyes. Inside his underpants, where Karen’s hand was urged, a single clammy mushroom thrived. Even in the nearly total darkness of the topiary shadows, Martin’s penis seemed unwholesomely pale and wet. But this was love, a crazy clamor to receive recognition. Did it matter that the person who unleashed Karen’s floodgates was much older—even older than she knew? Did it matter that he was a liar? Did it matter that he had practice, and she had none? Did it matter that after he opened Karen’s floodgates Karen’s “lake, river, reservoir, etc.” never refilled, to stick with the floodgates metaphor? Karen has thought about this, believe her. She knows she’s not a special kind of victim, for having gotten shown the ropes by a much older man who, it turned out, did not care about her. She knows this is perfectly common; just look at all the stories/plays/movies about it. She wanted him. In her ignorance and inexperience she thought he was handsome, worldly, earnest, and reliable, and now, with her knowledge and experience, she can see that he was ugly, provincial, duplicitous, and untrustworthy; even cruel. The fact remains that she wanted him. Her wanting him means that she chose. She doesn’t have a case here, she’s fully aware; this would be why she’s kept her mouth shut and kept her problem to herself. Martin’s “witch hunt” is made up of women who insist they have a case, but what’s different about them, exactly? Karen’s attitude toward them is violently mixed. She might defend them to David, but in her bowels she scorns them, these young women who made a bad judgment and now want to blame someone else.