‘They told me these Canadians were gonna be very naive.’
I still felt her nipples like lozenges, numb in my mouth.
‘You people think you can do anything.’
‘No…’
‘Think about it, Jew-boy.’
‘Think about what?’
I looked down at myself. My cock stuck still in my jeans, starfish wrinkles at my crotch.
I wanted to drop to my knees and just beg her, say: Jewboy wants back in to your patch!
But Barbra got up off my bed. I knew that you people meant me and my dad. She staggered out of my room, without looking back. I felt cold. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to be with her, know her real name. God, I felt guilty. I really didn’t understand why she’d left me right then.
I went to the site that Joel showed me of girls with no makeup with cum on their faces. They looked like Renaissance chicks with post-fuck pink cheeks, with their pulled-back hair and tilted heads. I wanted Barbra’s face. I wanted her face back in front of me. I wanted to drown her forehead in cum. I wanted to see my cum roll down her cheeks, stream over on her lips. I rubbed myself hard. Amerika. I imagined her still here, right between my legs. I wanted to make her lick me and taste it. I wanted to know what she thought about me. I wanted to lie here all night and read with her, finger her, do what she wanted. I imaged my cock right in front of her face. Divining rod. Spraying this whole airless place.
By the time the sun rose, I’d sprayed her five times.
I thought, I’ll let her call me Jew-boy for life.
§
My mother used to say that no one under thirty should have to take care of a kid. My mother said that when she got pregnant with me, my father promised he would split the work of baby care with her. She said they made a bargain that they would do things equally, that she would take time off teaching high school and he would pull back on his hours at the hospital – ‘all of it a bargain he did not keep,’ my mother said. She told me that my father wouldn’t get up in the middle of the night to give me a bottle. She said he was furious the first time that she woke him up to do it. ‘You were screaming,’ my mother told me, ‘like how babies scream, and your father started cursing at me – this is the middle of the night – and he’s yelling, goddamn it, someone in this goddamned house has to work, Ruth!’ My mother always imitated my father’s voice when she talked about him. She always said her own name with this particular spite. ‘Your father actually called me a bitch for waking him up – bitch is so nice to hear with a newborn shrieking, of course – and when I told him I absolutely would not stand for that word, he said he did not remember it, he said he would never call me such a bad name. He said, maybe it was in his sleep. He feigned innocence.’
‘I clocked that one,’ my mother said. And even though it never happened again, my mother told me that when she was on maternity leave, she was pissed off at my father the whole time she was pushing me around the city in a stroller. Then she said her doctor told her that her eggs would dry up if she didn’t get pregnant again soon. She was thirty-three years old. And then she had a miscarriage. My mother said it was awful and really, really painful. She said there was blood all over the bathroom floor and she could barely get up and she called my dad at work and he said he couldn’t leave so she called his mother. ‘Your Bubie Marsha had to come to our house to help me clean it all up. Your Bubie Marsha,’ my mother told me, ‘did that for your dad.’ I felt weird when she told me all this. Like I felt guilty, almost guilty by proxy for my father. Or it was too much information. Miscarriage blood. But my mother didn’t get it. She said she liked telling me things that happened when I was a kid. But to me it felt like a kind of tra
nsplanted revenge against my father. That miscarriage, as my mother told it, made her realize that she actually wanted to have another a baby. And my dad agreed with her that I shouldn’t be an only child, that siblings were good. And so my mother got pregnant with Abigail almost five years after me and she said that after Abigail she sort of fell into a rhythm, as if she finally accepted my dad’s essential breadwinner position and that her taking over with us kids was necessary, i.e., for the greater good.
‘Yeah, it was for society,’ my mother said, laughing. ‘Someone has to privilege the fucking family.’
My mother said that she didn’t ever regret being a fulltime, stay-at-home mom for so long – ‘because look at you and Abigail. My children are amazing. Everyone I know says that to me.’
I didn’t feel amazing. I felt totally average. And Abigail was amazing, but, come on, not in the typical sense.
It was my mother, in fact, who was amazing. My mother bought me condoms. Joel said that was fucked. But I know my mother was just trying to prepare me for sex.
Nuria was fifteen. We were both fifteen. I remember the night that I took her out for pizza and burned the roof of my mouth on the cheese. We came home around ten o’clock and went down to the basement. It seemed like both my parents were asleep. Actually, my mother told me that she’d told my father to knock on the door if I was ever in the basement with Nuria, so I knew that we were safe. I imagined doing it with her on the couch in front of the TV. Nuria, though, wanted to actually watch TV – some hospital drama – and I was kind of surprised. I tried to put my hand down her pants. She was fleshy. I liked that. My hand got stuck. I had to unzip her jeans first. She panted at the TV as if she were scared. Nuria had shaved. It was weird. I didn’t recognize her vagina.
Joel said, ‘Sluts shave so you can lick without choking.’
‘Do you like it?’ Nuria asked, staring at the TV.
‘Yeah, sort of,’ I said, not wanting to hurt her feelings. I got on my knees in front of her. I guess it was okay that she was watching TV. I had a condom in my pocket. I pulled her pants off all the way. I stared at her shaved vagina. I seriously did not recognize it. I mean, I’d seen vaginas like this before from Joel and his porn, but it reminded me of my sister, I mean, being a kid and being naked. It made me feel woozy. I’d been hard and then I lost it. I saw a bright red pimple on Nuria’s thigh. I pretended to look for the condom. I told Nuria to stay where she was, that I just had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t even feel like having sex anymore. But when I returned, Nuria was lying sideways on the couch and all her clothes were off. She was pretending she was sleeping. She didn’t even open her eyes when I crouched over her, saying her name. She giggled. When she giggled like that, I got hard. I ripped open the condom. I took a while to put it on even though I’d practised. I pinched the head of the thing. It felt too slippery. It went on right the second time. All I felt was the tight roll of the condom, the cement smell of the basement walls. Nuria kept giggling. She was wet when I went in. It was not what I thought it would feel like. She squealed. It felt too plastic or squishy. I was disappointed. This was it. I felt my ass clench. That felt good. It felt like the room shrunk. I just wanted to stay inside of myself inside of her. Then Nuria, at some point, punched up on my chest.
‘What?’ I groaned. ‘Stop hitting me.’
When a man hits a woman he lives with, said my mother, it’s called domestic abuse.
‘Stop!’ Nuria said, bouncing around on the couch.
I sluiced out of her body like a zipper going down. Immediately, I came inside the whole condom. I was off balance. My feet were sweating. I tried to kiss her face, then her tits. Nuria was acting so weird, trying to swim away from me. It was as if I’d done something wrong, something on purpose. She really didn’t want me to kiss her, she wanted to get up. So I stopped.
Doctors and nurses worked on the TV. My condom was the colour of turnip. It was only eleven o’clock. Nuria put on her clothes and was calling her brother to come pick her up.
‘Why are you so mad?’ I remember I kept saying. I could tell Nuria was trying not to cry. I didn’t want her to leave. Soon, we heard Nuria’s brother outside. I thought, the horn of abuse. I never had sex with Nuria again.