It starts with this folded up piece of paper: Pills in my hand and I’ve got a reason for each one. Death unavoidable, my ink arcing over that paper. I tried to tell, like I heard I should. It did not stop anything. I tried to run, but they caught up with me. Now my shame has overtaken me and this warbling is coming out of me. It’s crushed in my hand.
I start to get colder and my eyes start to feel heavy. I’ve heard that at these moments it is revealed to be a cry for help, that I’ll want to live desperately. They are wrong about that too. I feel so relieved. I will take their play thing away. This doll is shutting her eyes for the last time. No more smiling and pretending. That piece of paper in my hand says it all.
Every pill had a reason and I feel justified. I will sleep now.
.
My parents argue constantly but they agree on one thing: I must always be kind to their friends. I must set the place mats out, make the tea, and arrange the sterling silver tray full with snacks. My father has friends with hands that drift to my skirt as I walk by. I told my mom but she said it’s the nature of men. The nature of men is to touch, and the nature of woman to be a supplicant. Simple supply and demand.
I tried to bind my breasts tight with ace bandages. I hoped it would make them stop, but it seemed to have no effect. My mother noticed, though, and took the bandages away. She thought I was being really strange. I’m becoming a woman, I should be proud.
My father’s closest friend is a man named Henry. He owns a junk yard where I’ve spent many hours playing. It was there I learned about the lovely dark rainbows that appear if you look at oil puddles in the sun.
People throw away all kinds of things. I have a collection of mismatched china by his tire piles. I keep my china in a weather faded trunk with a yellowed rose papered interior. The tires seem to go on forever, huge hills of them. When I was little I could pretend they were the mountains of a distant land. Now I see them as dusty reminders of travelers that stopped.
Henry has oil stained clothes, a bald head, and a history of marrying and divorcing young secretaries. He has a dry sense of humor and a penchant for odd purchases. He loves auctions almost as much as my father. Every weekend they are together, racing from estate sale to estate sale piling their rusty treasures into an ugly red trailer.
When I was little I wanted Henry to like me. Now I wish he would stop following me with his beady eyes and his free hands. He always has a joke about my “development”. I try to hide in my room whenever he is over.
My mother comes to pull me from my room. She assures me I am making a mountain out of a mole hill. It is totally normal for Henry to notice me. I am a pretty girl. It’s harmless.
This is my first pill. The touching and my mother’s gentle admonishments to not get so upset.
My second pill happened soon after the first. I was twelve. I was home alone. Henry came in looking for my dad and found me instead. I don’t think I can even write this.
I played the piano while he stood behind me, hands on my shoulders. He was pressing them down ever so gently. “You’re so talented.” He murmured. Soon everything in the room dissolved to murmurs. I was floating above and watching. I can’t believe this is happening. He pats me on the head when it’s over and tells me to be a good girl. He tells me this is our secret, we’re special. So special together.
I drift to the shower and stand there for what seems like forever, scrubbing him off of me. What was that? Was that as okay as the random fondling? Morality is flexible, isn’t it? This was a stupid way to lose my virginity.
I used to imagine my wedding day, my prince charming husband with arms cradling a profusion of roses. I used to imagine the night of my senior prom, and a handsome boyfriend, or even the back seat of a car. I never pictured this.
Henry crushing the air from me. Henry and his good girl pats on the head. The thin line of blood on my leg merging with the water, swirling down the drain. The fear and the frightening intensity of anger boiling under my skin. I felt like I would break out in a rash of hatred. Boils of resentment, papules of terror, pustules lining my face with the truth I could not speak.
I sat in the shower and wept. What would my mother say if I told her? After the shower, I threw my soiled underwear away.
She came home first. Henry had left hours ago. My mother’s footsteps echoed on the hardwood floor. I curled in my bed and pressed my nails into my fist. She would never believe me. This was too much. Henry was my father’s best friend, like a brother… worth so much more to him than me. After all, he had told me I was an accident. That day I became someone else. I knew my value as I never had before.
She knocked on my door. I kept my hair in my eyes when she came in. If she noticed I’d been crying she didn’t say. So I didn’t say anything either.
That evening Henry came over for dinner. He watched me through hooded eyes while I pushed the peas around on my plate. My parents talked about the county’s upcoming election. I kept waiting for them to notice the way Henry was devouring me with his eyes, to notice the tension between us, to notice the way I refused to pass the bread his direction.
Maybe it wasn’t that they did not notice. Maybe it was that they didn’t care.
The next week I started my period for the first time. My body betrayed me in a blossom of bright red. It spread all over my bed in a stain during the night. I woke up aching and flushed with fever. I was embarrassed by the mark my body had made without my permission. I cried in frustration because I was no longer in control of anything. No, my breasts just kept wanting to grow.
The pads my mom had left in the bathroom for me were bulky and uncomfortable. They kept curling off my panties and sticking to the inside of my leg. I was so afraid of the memory of the stained bed all I would wear was black. I took my sheets in the back yard and dyed them black too with a box of RIT dye.
I stirred the bucket slowly, watching the stain disappear. Maybe that is how I could be. Get rid of all the light parts of me to hide the gross dark parts. Cover it all. I began to carry my pretty pastel dresses outside to the buckets. I plunged them into the dye and smiled as they grew darker and darker. I vowed never to wear lavender again.
My father asked why I wanted to look so depressing. My mother shushed him with talk of my big change. I felt my face turn red. I cannot believe she told him. I didn’t even tell her. She must have noticed the used pads hidden in the bottom of the trash can. I tried to hide them with toilet tissue…
Henry came over and told me he thought I looked very beatnik. I scowled at him and left the room. The only poetry I wanted was poetic justice. I wanted him to be going as crazy as me from all the things happening between us. He brought me a jewelry box with a ballerina inside. My mother crooned over it, saying how thoughtful he was. I didn’t want to take it but she pinched my arm hard. “Don’t be rude!” she hissed into my ear.
I stared at the jewelry box every night. The shadows cast over the mirrored bits on the front of it made it seem even creepier to me. All I wanted was to throw the thing out. I hated the little frozen smile on the ballerina’s face. I hated how her empty eyes looked so like me. I was becoming a doll. Stiff joints, stiff expression, played with and then forgotten.
School was my only escape because only there could I be what I dreamed of being: invisible. No one talked to me. I sat in the corner at lunch and read Jane Austin. I drifted from class to class as a ghost. I don’t think that even the teachers remembered my name. It was heaven.
It’s funny how people will believe whatever they are told. Like when Henry took me to the clinic for birth control. He told the doctor his poor girl was having such heavy periods. Wasn’t there something we could do? I left with a prescription Henry filled for me. And Henry doesn’t look anything like me. I even heard the nurses talking with each other. They thought he was such a sweet dad to get me all taken care of like that. I looked at them with wounded eyes. He’s not my dad! He didn’t even have to provide any identification for me. He called me Jennifer.
I swallowed some other pills because I am not Jennifer.
Henry volunteered at the children’s hospital and the prison. He read Goodnight Moon to kids and Bible passages to convicts. How amazing is that? He had everyone fooled, sometimes even me. Everyone was always on about how he was such a great guy. He even gave discounts on auto parts to single mothers! How nice is that!?
He wasn’t nice when he babysat me. Whenever my parents took a weekend to themselves I was with Henry. He would take me to breakfast and then take me back to his house. There he would remind me not to tell. He also had a lot to say about himself. He told me all about his life.
I tried not to listen but some things slipped through. He has a daughter about my age out there, but the mom is a terrible woman who won’t let him visit. She moved across the country and even changed her phone number. Sometimes he held me after and wept for her. He would stroke my hair and call me his Jennifer.
Sometimes I cried and begged him to stop. He would get angry and insist I was making him do it. I was always flirting with him. He knew I was just playing hard to get. Crushed underneath I held my breath trying not to smell him. I turned my face away from his and hid in the pillows. He would put his mouth so close to my ear and let me know I was being such a good, good girl.
I wanted to be bad but that was then. I was twelve. I didn’t know how.
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