And Then Things Fall Apart Page 2
Okay. Not quite that ridiculous, but the boy is—and let’s face it, I too am—slightly obsessed. When I’m on my deathbed and the great moments of my life flash before my eyes, I want the Great Virginity Losing to be right up there with winning the Pulitzer. Argh. Sex. It’s all we seem to talk about and think about—doing it, not doing it.
It’s supposed to be no big deal. According to CNN and concerned parenting websites, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are supposedly having tons of sex all over the place. Virginity is so Jane Austen. It is so Zeus disguised as a swan deflowering pale damsels by mountain streams in Greece. It is what chivalrous knights of King Arthur’s court jousted to the death to protect. Basically, it is an ancient, epic, powerful force, and more important to me than I let on.
I know for sure what sexy is—or what shampoo commercials, men’s razor blade ads, Victoria’s freaking Secret, and Maxim magazine want me to think is sexy. Yes, I know it so well, I could pull together a PowerPoint presentation about it for virgins everywhere.
And I can be that kind of sexy, whether or not I think it is really, truly, and authentically sexy—like, to me. How easy is it to put on a push-up bra, crawl on all fours, and lick someone’s neck? A child could do it!
But what do I myself find sexy? What do I feel sexy doing, regardless of what I’m supposed to think is sexy? Dear reader, I am still figuring it the hell out.
For instance, when Matt sprayed himself with some kind of musk oil and pressed his face into mine, smelling like a rotting mink carcass, I did not find that sexy. But. Slow dancing with him while he whispered the song lyrics into my ear? Hot. I also like a little neck biting. Textbook vampire crap, I know, but still. I love lying down together and trying to take a nap and not being able to. And what I love so much about Matt is that he wants to let me figure it out with him. He doesn’t seem to mind that he is my guinea pig. I wish it was the same for him.
Only a week ago Matt and I having our very first times together was the most important goal in my life. I savored every moment we were alone because I knew that one day we would finally crash our bodies together all the way and it would be an Armageddon of amazingness. And we would reach such levels of togetherness that the angels would weep with jealousy. Only a week ago.
But since our fight in the freezer, I haven’t seen or talked to Matt, which is a record for us. I have the chicken pox. I am at my grandma’s house. My parents are a mess. The last thing I want to think about is Matt. Except, because of everything, I can’t seem to help it.
Besides Matt, there aren’t many people who would care to know where I am. I’ve been a little wrapped up in myself lately. I mean, when I say I am under a bell jar same as my comrade in depression, Esther Greenwood, I am not kidding. It’s hard to breathe in here. Thoughts bounce around the inside of my head like Ping-Pong balls in a see-through vacuum cleaner. Bounce, twist, bounce, twist, and then they all collide in midair and I am, suddenly, no fun to be around. I’m so busy listening to myself droning on and on in the echo chamber that, believe me, I’m not calling up my old pal Nicola to chitchat and work on our upcycled Etsy shop. I’m barely washing my hair. Like Esther, I’m feeling like, What’s the point? It’s just going to get dirty again. Which is, I’m sure, how a perfectly sane person begins to slowly go crazy until two months later she is finger-weaving macramé belts from used dental floss instead of updating her Facebook status, eating food, or getting out of bed.
When my fever is at its highest—or today, anyway—I see tiny letters, like a, s, d, f, g, j, k, l, flapping like butterflies in front of my face. The letters are all different colors.
Matt is very beautiful. His whole body is taut, and his muscles are watery like the frog we dissected in biology. Which sounds entirely psychotic, like my boyfriend’s a mutant frogboy, which is not what I mean. I mean he is very fluid and stronger than he looks. I once watched him pin this ridiculously solid senior in thirty seconds. We wrestle, but he always lets me win. And let me tell you, I am a mess over him.
But how will he even know that I am not dead? Last time we talked, we had this fight, and I acted like I was okay with everything when I wasn’t, really. Instead of screaming at him and weeping and whatever else I probably should have done, all I said was that I had a really bad headache and that I had to go home and that maybe I’d see him later.
Later became Mom getting the phone call from Auntie and jetting off to California, and then me and the Dr. Proboscis fiasco, and me staying at my grandma’s in the upstairs bedroom while my father lurks in the basement like a caged monster. And the only available phone is harvest-wheat colored with square push buttons and is down the hall. Gram should sell it for big money on eBay as a freaking retro collectible.
There used to be furniture made especially for telephones. Telephone chairs and telephone tables. Which is so sad, seeing as how there are no more phones like that. I mean, besides Gram, how many people still have a landline?
My mom told me that when she was a little kid, the phone company set up this number where you could call Santa before Christmas. A recording would answer “Ho, ho, ho!” and then talk about some Christmas tradition from Holland (straw for the reindeer in the shoes) or the Czech Republic (walnuts or chocolate coins in stockings). Mom called the Santa line five times a day until she got in trouble for running up the phone bill.
She also told me that you could call a number and they would tell you what time it was. WHY? Today all you have to do is look at your cell phone, which is calibrated to the correct time via satellite in outer-freaking-space. Whatev. No one’s calling me on any device of any kind, retro, broken, satellite-calibrated, or otherwise.
I think I am hallucinating. Before the letter Q crash-landed on my left thumb knuckle, it flapped around and looked like this:
Time to sleep.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
DATE: July 15
MOOD: All by Myself I Am a Huge Camellia
BODY TEMP: 103.5
Sylvia actually wrote a poem called “Fever 103°” that’s in her other masterpiece, a book of poems called Ariel. The poem is all about flushing and heat and going and coming and giant flowers, and I always thought it was about, er, sex. Oh, dear reader, a true Plathian cannot survive on The Bell Jar alone.
Fever and sex are totally similar, I guess. I’m starting to think all poetry is, in an oblique and cunning way, about human desire and copulation. Even that Carl Sandburg poem “Fog” that we all had to memorize in fourth grade:
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Could be about sex if you think about fog as desire and the city as a teenager.
Maybe it’s just me.
Chicken pox, by the way, are really vile. And itch. Christ, do they itch. I’m a mature and sophisticated teenager, and I can barely stop scratching. I want to scratch as badly as I imagine addicts crave heroin. I will scratch until my skin bleeds. I will throw a sheet over the itchiest part of my body and rub through the cotton until a little watery blood seeps through, and then, for good measure, just to show the pox who is boss, I scratch some more.
But not my face. Little kids don’t know not to scratch their face, so I guess I’m ahead of the game there. Not that I’m so gorgeous or anything, but I’m not ugly, either. And yet I am still avoiding my reflection in the mirror because the pox, when the light is a certain way, look exactly like Big Tim’s acne in algebra and seeing that—on my own face!—is so depressing, it might just push me over the edge. The edge of what, I don’t know, but every day I feel like I’m clawing my way back to stable ground but can’t quite make it to safety. Like can’t . . . hold . . . on . . . much . . . longer . . . But of course, I do. Dad does. Mom does. What is the freaking alternative?
Mom di
dn’t even call to let me/us know her plane got in okay. My phone is a piece of scrap metal, right? And I suppose she didn’t want to call the house and have to talk to her soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law.
I, too, am avoiding my grandma, which is hard when you are bedridden and she is the one home all day taking care of you. I’m embarrassed in front of her, like what my dad did has something to do with me. You think I’m upset about my father’s ridiculous behavior with Amanda and the way he royally broke my mom’s heart and totally screwed up my life, and demolished our entire family? Believe me, my grandma is not feeling like mother of the year. I can just imagine a bumper sticker on her Saturn, PROUD PARENT OF A MIDLIFE ADULTERER! She makes hard-boiled eggs for me to snack on and walks around the house smoking Winstons. When she leans over to plump my pillows, she smells like the back room at the restaurant where the dishwashers have their smoke breaks in winter. And instead of gagging, I inhale more because it smells like things used to be, before the shit hit the fan. My life. Right now.
Oh, and it’s summer and ninety-seven degrees, but my teeth are chattering nonstop.
My mother raised me to think all men are kind of stupid. Albert Einstein wasn’t stupid, but he also wasn’t so nice to his wife and could barely dress himself in the morning. My father can run a business, but he barely remembers to put gas into the van.
To be fair, males and females are practically different species entirely. In high school the boys run around like eighth graders hopped up on Fruity Pebbles, and the girls already know about Kegel exercises, existentialism, and the three Cs of diamond valuation (color, cut, and clarity). Even now, in my soon-to-be sophomore year there are some boys who still don’t shave. Or smell when they sweat. Or realize that girls do not have cooties. How the hell are these poor simps supposed to know how to sweep a girl off her feet or unburden her of her pesky virginity with the painless dashing aplomb of a dark-eyed, stubbled movie star?
I’m not sure what I’m talking about here. All I know is that Matt is not dumb. He is also no Einstein. But he’s just like Einstein. He knows how to spread his fingers apart on my back when we lie down, his mouth on my mouth until I can see how in love we are with my eyes closed. He refers to Sylvia Plath as “that friend of yours,” and I’m not sure if he is kidding or if he really thinks we borrow each other’s clothes and have sleepovers. He knows how to make a night out in the city—to see a band or eat sushi or whatever—fun and safe and dangerous, and still get me home on time. But he doesn’t understand how I could want to stay home by myself once in a while.
“What do you do? Like, watch TV and stuff?” We have been together for more than a year. I read. Duh. I write poetry and make bracelets and earrings from nonrecyclable kitchen items. I take pictures with my digital camera of things underwater and make note cards out of them on Snapfish.com. I teach myself how to do actual DIY things from the Internet, like knit, make crepe paper roses, and soap with olive oil. Sometimes I just cram my earbuds into my ears, listen to Beethoven for an hour and a half, and stare out the window at the baseball diamond across the street and think.
He—and when I say “he,” I could mean any guy in high school—is very body identified. Matt especially needs to keep his body active and exercised, like a Labrador puppy. As long as his body is involved—eating, making out, running, wrestling, driving, etc.—he seems to know how to behave. When it’s just us talking, especially on the phone and there are no bodies to distract him, he can’t quite keep up his end of the conversation. He knows enough at the end to say “I love you,” but after “Hi, Keekie” and before the love declaration, there are a lot of ums, ohs, and I dunnos.
It’s not that I think he’s dumb. I don’t. He’s not. Matt starts AP History in the fall. It’s just that right now his body is doing all the thinking. I like him. I like his body. So there’s not really much of a problem. And sometimes he really does get me, like he is absorbing more of me than he lets on, and when I need it, he lets me know. And it makes up for all the other stuff that doesn’t fit so great, and I think about doing it with him all over again. But then again, he is smart enough to withhold vital information from the love of his life. And I thought that was me.
For someone who loves to be alone a lot, I’m starting to go a little crazy. No one is really talking with me, to me, around me. Since I started hanging out so much with Matt, and frittering the rest of my time away with the backstabber-to-the-stars Amanda, I have been totally ignoring my friend Nicola—aka, Nic. And what I mean is, almost entirely. She just doesn’t get it. It takes too many words to explain the details of what’s happening with me to her, a girl I have known since grade school, who gets straight As, who never says “fuck” in front of adults, who doesn’t have her virginity hanging on by a thread. She has probably written me off. Which I deserve, I suppose.
So, yeah, lots of silence except for the occasional dog bark and ice-cream truck jingle. And like Esther Greenwood, I find the silences—the world’s and my own—are totally depressing me. I’m not exactly initiating conversations here. I’m asleep most of the time, and then I wake up and want to cry and scratch at the same time, which is confusing.
Crying and scratching. They are both supposed to offer relief, but they don’t. My muscles feel bruised and my bones hurt where they get near my skin. I am happiest when I’m typing. And then I push the typewriter off my lap and curl my body around it like a sea horse and fall asleep like Esther, knowing that when I wake up, things will be more or less exactly the same.
ANAGRAMS FOR THE TIME BEING
In a bell jar everything is
Distorted.
Words lose meaning but gain momentum.
Amanda, friend from hell,
Becomes a
Half-informed alderman.
Sylvia Plath
Is
Lavishly apt.
Mother, Father, Amanda, and me
Almost transforms into the
Madmen of the Earth Armada.
This one reluctant virgin
Is now an
Earth-convulsing nitrite.
Jesters gesture,
And
Listen
Now is
Silent.
DATE: July 16
MOOD: Limp As a Wet Leaf
BODY TEMP: 103.5
In The Bell Jar Esther gets ptomaine poisoning from bad crabmeat on the Ladies’ Day banquet table. She’s in the bathroom puking her guts out, all shivery and pummeled by tsunamis of nausea. Which is totally how I felt today as I retched into the toilet. And I mean exactly. I am utterly and completely as sick as I have ever been.
Well, once I had a stomachache so bad, my parents finally dragged me to a pediatrician, who thought I might have appendicitis and so did a rectal exam—yes, a RECTAL exam—only to determine that I had a stomach flu.
My parents have their own business, and health insurance costs a freaking fortune. We have it, but visits at the peak of illness before I die are cheaper in the long run than shucking out cash for regular checkups when I am apparently healthy. Thank you, Dine & Dash, for making my life even more miserable than it is already.
In Sylvia Plath’s masterpiece, The Bell Jar, the modern classic beloved by passionate, sophisticated girls the world over, Esther Greenwood returns to her mother’s suburban home after a whirlwind trip to NYC, where she sort of lost her mind. She is demoralized by being alive. She is homesick for something she has never experienced. She longs for something she cannot explain while dogs yap behind fences and station wagons roll down quiet blacktopped streets. It freaks her out and inspires her to down a jar of sleeping pills.
Being at Gram’s isn’t as bad as all that, but it ain’t so spectacular either. Gram has this neighbor, June, who has a brown Labrador named Hershey, like the chocolate, who wants to maul all humans. I like animals. I am kind of into them, seeing as how they are becoming extinct left and right—practically keeling over and dropping dead all around the world. Even my pseudo-vegetarianism is
a non-cruelty thing. Kind of like how the Hippocratic oath works for doctors: First, do no harm. I try, unlike most of the adults I have the misfortune to know, not to hurt people and/or animals. At least not on purpose. So if eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich means one less horrifically slaughtered long-lashed cow, why not? Is meat really so delicious?
And so this dopey dog, Hershey, barks and snarls and bares his teeth at anything that walks on two legs. That includes mail carriers, Gram, me, garbage men, babies, kids on bikes. I have often sat, chin in hand, daydreaming of Amanda reaching down to pet Hershey, saying, in that stupid Betty Boop voice she liked to put on for effect, “Ooh, what a nice wittle doggy,” right before Hershey lunges three feet into the air and chomps on the side of her face, skewering her eyeball with his canines.
His bark is not chocolaty. It is like this: Woowoo! Woowoo! Woo! Snarl, snarl. Woowoo Woowoo! Woo! And then he slam dances against the chain-link fence until June lets him back inside the house. Every two hours, the Hershey show. Woo!
I totally relate to Hershey. He is cute and ferocious. He’s as trapped as the rest of us here. Maybe he was hurt before, or is, like, a rescue dog or something. Abused. Because when you have been hurt, and I mean betrayed, and your heart gets tromped on by people you really trusted and loved, you get kind of mean. And skittish. At least for a while.
Speaking of betrayal, let us not forget the boyfriend who has forsaken me; or my beloved and adulterous father hiding in his lair in the basement—so depressed and self-centered, I can hardly look at him when he emerges; or my fever and itching and overall malaise. Or that my mom has pretty much abandoned me. And no, it’s not suicide-inducing, but it is pretty strenuous on my coping skills.