Homesick for Another World(13)

“I have an uncle,” I said, taking another cookie.

“I just have my mom,” she said. “She’s sleeping. All she really does is sleep.”

Terri’s face looked puffy and sad. I figured she’d improve after a course of diuretics, some benzoyl peroxide. I ate a few more cookies.

“Are you hungry?” she asked again. I tried to imagine getting on top of her. I imagined it would be like resting on a water bed.

“Better we do it before we eat,” I said, pushing the plate of Nutter Butters away. Terri blushed. I knew I was better looking than her. I knew she would be grateful no matter what I did to her. She stood and led me to her bedroom. I watched her struggle with her jeans. Her thighs swung around as she crawled onto the bed. She kept her bra on, thank God. “You’re so handsome,” she said. I stood above her and took my shirt off. Terri reached up to touch me. I wasn’t all that interested in being touched. I didn’t want her to feel my rash. What I wanted was to put my fingers in her mouth. I closed my eyes and felt around her face and stuck my index finger inside. She used her tongue on it and sucked it, and I put another finger in. She kept sucking on my fingers. It was such a good feeling. It was like coming out of the cold and stepping into a cozy room with a fire going. It was like stepping into a hot bath. I wanted to put my whole hand in her mouth. I held the back of her head with one hand and reached down her throat with the other. She choked and tried to speak, but I just kept shoving my hand down there. I could see my hand bulging in her throat from the outside. Eventually she stopped struggling. “Good girl,” I wanted to say but didn’t. When I looked down, I could see something twinkle in her eyes.

Afterward I didn’t kiss her or pet her or anything. It wasn’t like that. We got up and ate the food she had made: spaghetti and meatballs and chocolate pudding. Then I threw up and said good-bye. I told her I’d call her. She stood on the front porch in a pink robe and watched me drive away.

? ? ?

Later, when my uncle asked me how the date went, I told him all the details.

“Terri is the most beautiful woman in the world. Luscious brown hair, little button nose, eyes like a baby deer. She’s classy, you know. Not like all these sluts down here. And she’s fun, too. We really did it up. We had a great time.”

My uncle grumbled and adjusted the seat-back angle of his recliner.

“Be careful with women,” he told me. “All they want is love and money.”

“Terri’s different,” I said. “Can’t you just be happy for me?” I put my hands in prayer position and held them up to my uncle, as though I were making a plea. Ever since Malibu he acted like everything I did was stupid, like everything I did rubbed him the wrong way. He wouldn’t look at me. He just stared straight ahead at the television.

“If she’s so great,” said my uncle, “why isn’t she here spooning us up some Neapolitan ice cream? Where is she, anyway?” He took a handful of peanuts from the container in his lap and let them trickle down from his fist into his mouth. I watched him chew and poke at the colostomy bag. I never answered his questions.

Later we watched The Maury Povich Show and One Life to Live and a movie about people who live in the New York City subway tunnels.

I mowed the lawn again.





THE WEIRDOS


On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients’ theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water. I asked what the point of it all was, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Lying on the grass outside a tennis arena, he held my face toward the sun, stared sideways at my eyeballs, and began to cry. He told me I was the sign he’d been waiting for and, like looking into a crystal ball, he’d just read a private message from God in the silvery vortex of my left pupil. I disregarded this and was impressed instead by the ease with which he rolled on top of me and slid his hands down the back of my jeans, gripping my buttocks in both palms and squeezing, all in front of a Mexican family picnicking on the lawn.

He was the manager of an apartment complex in a part of town where the palm trees were sick. They were infested with a parasite that made them soft like bendy straws, and so they arched over the roads, buckling under the weight of their own heads, fronds skimming the concrete surfaces of buildings, poking in through open windows. And when the wind blew, they clattered and sagged and you could hear them creaking. “Someone needs to cut these trees down,” my boyfriend said one morning. He said it like he was really sad about it, like it really pained him, like someone, I don’t know who, had really let him down. “It’s just not right.”

I watched him make the bed. His sheets were a poly-cotton blend, stained, faded, and pilly pastel landscapes. What was supposed to keep us warm at night was a spruce green sleeping bag. He had an afghan he said his grandmother had knit—a matted brown and yellow mess of yarn that he laid asymmetrically over the corner of the bed as a decorative accent. I tried to overlook it.

I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood. It was a shadowy, crumbling collection of bungalows and auto-body shops. The apartment complex rose a few stories above it all, and from our bedroom window I could look out and down into the valley, which was always covered in orange haze. I liked how ugly it all was, how trashy. Everyone in the neighborhood walked around with their heads down on account of all the birds. Something in the trees attracted a strange breed of pigeon—black ones, with bright red legs and sharp, gold-tipped talons. My boyfriend said they were Egyptian crows. He felt they’d been sent to watch him, and so he behaved even more carefully than ever. When he passed a homeless person on the street, he shook his head and muttered a word I don’t think he could have spelled: “ingrate.” If I turned my back during breakfast he’d say, “I noticed you spilled some of your coffee, so I wiped it up for you.” If I didn’t thank him profusely, he’d put down his fork, ask, “Was that okay?” He was a child, really. He had childish ideas. He told me he “walked like a cop,” which scared off criminals on the street at night. “Why do you think I’ve never been mugged?” He made me laugh.