All The Ugly and Wonderful Things 16

 

 11

 

WAVY

 

1986

 

After Kellen was UNAUTHORIZED CORRESPONDENCE, and Donal was NO FORWARDING ORDER, I felt dead. I woke up in the mornings surprised my heart was still beating. The food I snuck at night tasted like nothing. I stole a whole red velvet cake from Mrs. NiBlack that was for a charity auction. It tasted like dirt. That was what I imagined it was like being dead. Feeling empty with the taste of dirt in your mouth.

 

Whatever Val felt now that she was dead, I couldn’t think of her as Mama anymore. I wanted to take her flowers like Kellen had done for his mother, but I couldn’t stand to go see her now that she was lying next to Liam.

 

Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire. The only thing that made it hurt less was moving my hands. Like Kellen washing dishes, making his head empty. I sliced and knitted and ironed and sanded and hammered and typed, trying to make my heart empty. Home economics class. Typing class. Woodshop class. Homeroom, where I volunteered to make decorations for dances.

 

The questions never stopped, but in high school, I learned a new way to deal with them. No matter what the question was, I nodded.

 

Were your parents really murdered? Yes.

 

Did your boyfriend kill your parents? Yes.

 

Is it true you were gang-raped by some bikers? Yes.

 

Aunt Brenda told the story to her book club and they told someone else, who told someone else, and on and on and on, getting less true every time it got told. Even less true than Aunt Brenda’s version.

 

I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

 

I also liked watching people. The girl who was pregnant changed the way she moved to hide it. The boy who looked at people like they were bugs scribbled angry things in his notebook. The teachers kissing desperately in the storage room weren’t married to each other. Amy stood too close to the Spanish teacher when she worked the football concession stand. Leaning over, she brushed her arm longingly against Mrs. Ramirez’s arm.

 

Watching and doing made things bearable. Also, time passed, even while I slept. After I turned twenty-one, Aunt Brenda wouldn’t be able to frown and say, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate way to spend your trust fund.”

 

Even before that, I would be eighteen. I could find out things Aunt Brenda didn’t want me to know. Where was Donal? How long until Kellen was free?

 

In the meantime, the things that hurt other people healed me.

 

At the end of my freshman year, a girl in my class was raped. Held down and raped by two boys in a bullpen at the city baseball diamond. The rape made other girls nervous, but it reminded me that Kellen loved me. He hadn’t raped me. I slipped secret notes in the girl’s locker. Notes to say, “You’re very good at math,” and “Your hair is pretty today.”

 

During my junior year, a boy in Amy’s class killed himself. He had terrible acne, purple welts like bee stings all over his face, and he went home from school and hung himself. I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less. If I lay very still in bed at night, I remembered how Grandma’s house smelled. The taste of mint ice cream on Kellen’s tongue. Donal jumping on the bed to wake me up.

 

For everyone else, the boy killing himself was scary. It made Aunt Brenda hug Amy harder and tell Leslie it was okay if she wanted to move home from the dorm, where she was lonely, even though the college was only twenty miles away. It made them go to church more, hoping God would comfort them.

 

I didn’t think God could comfort anyone, but I was content to go and sit in the sanctuary. People stared at me sometimes, but they had to follow the rules and I didn’t. God made everyone else stand up and sing, sit down and pray, stand up, sit down, pray, sing, pray. God didn’t seem to care if I read novels or knitted scarves.

 

Youth group was harder to get through. Charlotte, the youth pastor, was a hugger. She was big and blond, with an enormous mouth full of teeth to hold her big smiley voice. Once, she visited the house, so she and Aunt Brenda could discuss her concerns about me not being baptized. Swimming in a stock tank under the full moon didn’t count.

 

“I know you’ll be discreet,” Aunt Brenda told Charlotte. “So I’m just going to tell you the whole sordid story. To help you understand. So you can be sensitive to Wavy’s situation.”

 

Only Aunt Brenda didn’t tell the whole sordid story. She never told anyone about the deposition, but especially not Charlotte. As much as Charlotte loved crying and hugging, she loved to talk about sex more. Or she loved to talk about how you weren’t supposed to have sex.

 

“God made your body a temple to honor him and he wants you to cherish that gift. He doesn’t want you to put drugs in it. He doesn’t want you to hurt yourself driving recklessly. And He doesn’t want you to share yourself with just anyone. The gift of your temple is for you to share with the special person God has chosen for you.” Charlotte always looked so happy when she talked like that. Ecstatic.

 

God also didn’t want you to “pollute yourself.” Touching yourself for pleasure wasn’t what God designed your temple for, according to Charlotte. Either God was stupid or Charlotte was confused, because my temple was clearly designed for that.

 

“When you get married, the purity of your temple will be a gift you give not only to your spouse but to God. The gift of honoring His commandments.” Charlotte wasn’t married and sometimes I caught her looking at Kellen’s ring on my finger.

 

I wondered, was Charlotte saving her loud-mouthed temple for someone?

 

The girl in front of me had a better question: “But what about people who aren’t virgins when they get married?”

 

“Our God is a merciful God,” Charlotte said. “If a person honestly regrets what they’ve done—”

 

“But what if it’s not their fault?”

 

“Yeah, like what if a girl gets raped?” Amy’s best friend Angela said. She sounded mad.

 

Charlotte’s mouth made a big O.

 

“That’s not the same thing,” said Marcus. He had a crush on Amy, but he might as well have been at home polluting his temple as sitting there mooning over her.

 

“Marcus is right, that’s not the same thing.” Charlotte’s voice went into its pre-cry quaver. “God understands that bad things can happen to good people.”

 

“But it still means you’re not a virgin,” said the girl in front of me.

 

“God can make everything right if we trust Him. If we pray, He can take cancer away. He can bring people back to life.”

 

“So God could make you a virgin again?”

 

People laughed at the girl for asking that, but Charlotte said, “Why is that so funny? God parted the Red Sea and Jesus resurrected Lazarus. He can do anything.”

 

When everybody broke for snacks, I stayed in my corner reading. Sometimes Amy and Angela sat with me, but Leslie was there that night, wanting to run away from college and sneak back into her safe high school life. The three of them were at the refreshment table, when Charlotte walked over to me.

 

“Can we talk, Wavy?” Without waiting for an answer Charlotte sat down and scooted her chair up as close as she could, so no one else would hear. Like I would want to have a secret with her. “I want you to know that I believe what I said with all my heart. What happened to you, God can heal you of that. Because He knows that in your heart, you’re still pure.”

 

Charlotte’s hand swooped toward my arm, but stopped short of touching me.

 

“Will you let me pray with you? Ask God to heal you? To take away what was done to you and make you whole?”

 

“I don’t want your god to make me a virgin,” I said.

12

AMY

1986–1987

Wavy said it loud enough that everyone in the youth group lounge heard her. Then she walked over to Leslie and held out her hand.

“Car keys?”

“Wavy, she’s just trying to help,” Leslie said.

Charlotte hurried up to us and gasped, “Will you ask Wavy to come into my office to talk, Leslie?”

Wavy snapped her fingers angrily at Leslie. I could see in Wavy’s eyes that she had maybe only ten seconds of calm left. Angela saw it, too, and said, “Jeez, Les, give her the keys.”

“They’re in my purse.”

“Oh, Wavy. Please, let me help you.” Charlotte was getting ready to cry.

Wavy turned on her heel, crossed to where Leslie’s purse hung over the back of her chair. In one economical movement, she emptied Leslie’s purse on the seat and picked up the keys. Five steps to the door and she was gone.

“She doesn’t want your help,” Angela said.

“God wants to heal her, if only she would open her heart,” Charlotte said.

“She’s fine.” Only as I said it did I realize it was true. Considering everything she’d been through, Wavy was doing pretty well.

“We better go,” Leslie said.

One of those rare occasions when Leslie and I agreed. She put her stuff back in her purse and we left. Behind us, Charlotte sniffled.

When we got to the car, Wavy was curled up in the backseat. I got in beside her while Angela rode up front with Leslie.

“What a witch,” Angela said. “She’s probably not even a virgin. Not that I can imagine anyone having sex with her.”

“It’s not true.” Wavy’s voice was flat.

“Charlotte’s right. I know you don’t like her, but she’s right. What happened to you doesn’t count,” Leslie said. I didn’t know if she wanted to reassure Wavy or reassert Charlotte’s ecclesiastical authority on renewable virginity.

“I am a virgin.”

Leslie flicked on the windshield washer. She didn’t have the nerve to ask but I couldn’t stand not knowing.

“But what about—” I hesitated, because it wasn’t a name to be said lightly in our family: “Kellen?”

“He never fucked me.”

“Wavy! Watch your mouth.” Leslie’s perfect impersonation of Mom. I ignored her.

“But the police report. Your deposition—”

“His alibi.” Wavy hugged her knees more tightly, her white skirt bunching over her black-stockinged legs. That was the first time I realized that while Leslie and I were growing up, Wavy was staying the same. Staying fourteen. Not even that. Staying thirteen. In three years she hadn’t grown at all.

“But your blood on the desk blotter.” Why was I arguing? To say, No, you can’t be a virgin? The police report said so. Kellen pled guilty.

“He broke my hymen with his fingers,” Wavy said.

“See? Really, you’re still a virgin.” Angela leaned over the backseat, trying to help.

“I wish he had fucked me.”

“You don’t mean that,” Leslie said, half-sad, half-disapproving.

“No one could take that away.”

I didn’t blame Wavy for feeling that way. The bike and the ring, they were just things. Donal and Kellen were all she cared about, and they’d both been taken away from her.

In bed that night, I said, “What was it like?” It makes me sound like a morbid ghoul, but why else had Wavy offered that secret? She wanted to tell someone.

“Wonderful. His hands are big and rough. He slid his ring finger into me. It burned. There was blood, but I wanted to have him in me. He wouldn’t.”

“But your deposition.” I kept coming back to the Gospel. Wavy spoke in Apocrypha.

“He wouldn’t. He was scared of hurting me and he wanted to wait until we got married. Rubbing against me made him come. On the desk. Between my legs. Not in me. He never fucked me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I lay there and listened to the whisper of covers moving over her flannel nightdress. Tiny sparks leapt like lightning in a petri dish meadow. Wavy sighed and shivered and hiccupped. After sharing a room with her for three years I was used to the sound of her masturbating. I never got used to the sound of her crying.

*   *   *

I lost my own virginity at a party four months later. It involved a nice guy named Marcus, who thought he was in love with me, and too much alcohol. I felt like such a coward about that. Instead of going into it with my eyes open, I lied to myself. I thought if I was drunk it would be this magical thing that just happened.

I’d had a huge fight with Angela, who was going to a different college on a track and field scholarship. She kept saying, “We’ll visit each other,” but then I found out she was getting back together with her ex-boyfriend, who was going to the same school. Her ex-boyfriend who hated me. I knew we would never visit each other if she was dating him. When I told her she deserved better, she got mad.

“You don’t own me,” she said.

I felt like my heart had been ripped out, and when Wavy and I got to the party, Marcus was there. I wanted it to be wonderful, like Wavy said, but it was awkward and painful and embarrassing. I was so drunk that after Wavy and I got home, I was sick. We managed to sneak past Mom and into the bathroom, where I vomited my guts up and cried.

“I don’t love him,” I sobbed. I liked him, but I didn’t love him. I wasn’t even attracted to him beyond the fact that he had good hygiene. I thought it meant something that he was in love with me, but it only means something if you love the other person. And I loved Angela.

“It’s over,” Wavy said, as I lay on the floor with a cold washcloth on my forehead. I thought she meant the puking, but she said, “Nothing left to be afraid of.”

I’d been afraid of so many things: sex, graduating, college, leaving home, falling in love. Life. Now I’d fallen in love, gotten my heart broken, and had meaningless sex. Those scary things were over. In three months I would leave for college. There would be other things to be afraid of later, but lying there, drunk and hurting all over, I wasn’t afraid.

I wondered how it was for Wavy. She’d fallen in love, had her heart broken, almost had sex, and had her whole family taken away from her. Did she still have things to be afraid of?

That Kellen wouldn’t love her long enough. The years were adding up. Mom thought Wavy would get over it, but she was wrong. Wavy still loved him, but when he got out of prison, would he still love her?

Wavy made her way as best she could, found ways to fit in on her terms. For instance, she didn’t go to her senior prom, but she was the chairperson for the decoration committee. The prom was Valentine’s themed: red and pink, with hearts and hundreds of hand-tucked crepe-paper roses with green sisal stems. Things like that always looked effortless in Wavy’s hands.

She strung elaborate garlands along the edges of the bleachers, and in the corner where prom pictures would be taken. The garlands were pink and red with bits of gold foil, alternating reversed hearts. Everyone assumed they were hearts, until halfway through the prom, when one of the parent chaperones admired the decorations at just the right angle. That year none of the prom pictures could be used in the yearbook. “Obscene,” the school board called them.

Instead of hearts, Wavy had very skillfully alternated between erect penises and curvaceous rumps that narrowed to delicate but well-defined vulvas.

The school board threatened to keep her from graduating, but in the end, Wavy got to walk across the dais in her big boots. She accepted her diploma from the principal’s grudgingly outstretched hand, and walked to the other end of the stage. From up in the stands, home from my first year of college, I watched her kiss Kellen’s ring.

Four years into a ten-year prison sentence, did he feel the same?

13

KELLEN

June 1987

The hearing room was small, the same gray cinder block as my cell. There was a table for the parole board, another for me and my lawyer, and some folding chairs along the wall for witnesses. I had to wear a leg iron, hooked to an eyebolt in the floor, but at least they didn’t cuff me. The room was too warm, close enough quarters I wondered if Wavy would be able to smell me. I’d showered like she might, trimmed my hair, shaved, and tucked my shirt in. Not to impress the board. I didn’t figure there was much I could do to make them like me.

Heading into my fifth year, I was tired. I’d spent four years sitting around, reading, lifting weights, and sleeping. Four years thinking about Wavy, because I didn’t have enough to do with my hands, especially in solitary. Odds on I was gonna do another year before my next hearing. Another year before I might get a chance to see Wavy again.

After my lawyer, the parole board showed up, then Old Man Cutcheon, who I couldn’t hardly believe had come all that way for me after the trouble I’d caused him. Then Brenda Newling walked in. Seeing her looking older, I wondered what Wavy looked like now.

Brenda glared at me like she wanted to burn a hole in me, but it didn’t. Wavy hadn’t come, and if she wasn’t there, I didn’t care what happened. I knew the fight was gonna come up and that was the first thing the parole board mentioned.

“I see you had an altercation with a fellow inmate six months ago. A pretty serious one. The man ended up in the infirmary, and you’ve been in administrative segregation since then? That doesn’t exactly suggest you’re ready for parole. Would you like to tell us about that?”

I didn’t want to, but I had to say something.

“Look, because of my conviction, there’s always some guy wanting to mess with me. He came at me with a shiv.”

“Did you have some personal issue with him?” the woman on the board said.

“I didn’t know him. It’s just because of what I pled to. Some guys, they find that out, they have it in for me.” I had scars to show for two times I let my guard down.

“Inmates who have sexual convictions involving minors are often targeted by other inmates,” my lawyer said. “Mr. Barfoot has worked hard to rehabilitate himself.”

“Can you tell us what you’ve done to prepare yourself for parole?”

“I finished my GED.”

“Also Mr. Barfoot completed the court-mandated program for sex offenders,” my lawyer said.

I didn’t like thinking about that. Three months spending every day in the same room with child molesters and rapists. The whole thing gave me a creeping dread of myself, but I didn’t have to lie in the exit interview. Do you still have sexual fantasies about young girls? they asked. No. I never had. I thought about Wavy a hundred times a day, but Wavy was Wavy, not some young girl.

Then it was Mr. Cutcheon’s turn to talk to the board. It choked me up so that I couldn’t look at him. For reasons I still don’t get, he took a chance on me when nobody else would.

“Jesse Joe’s a good boy,” he told the parole board. I was surprised they didn’t laugh at him. “I know he’s been in some trouble with the law, but the fact is, he loved that girl. He treated her good, took care of her, made sure she went to school. He looked out for her when nobody else did. Not even her, sitting there glaring at me.” He cut his eyes over at Brenda. “She wasn’t the one taking Wavy to school every day, I tell you what.”

I figured that all he meant to do was give me a decent character witness, but then he said, “He’ll have a job if he gets paroled. I’d hire him back tomorrow if I could.”

After he finished talking, he tried to come over and shake my hand. The guards had to explain to him he wasn’t allowed to do that.

“Thanks, Mr. Cutcheon, I really appreciate it,” I said. He nodded and kinda waved at me.

“You take care. We’ll be seeing you soon. I got this cussed Waverunner I can’t hardly figure—”

“Mr. Cutcheon?” the parole board head said.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m going.”

He went, and then it was just me and Brenda.

She stood up, and the parole board head said, “You’re Brenda Newling? The, uh, victim’s aunt?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve got a statement?”

She unfolded a piece of paper she’d clenched in her fist.

“I’m here today, because Wavy found it too upsetting to come. I’m asking the board to turn down his request for parole, because the damage he’s done isn’t over. My niece turns eighteen in July and she still hasn’t recovered. She was a vulnerable little girl, with no one to protect her from his predations. He presented himself as her friend and groomed her for a sexual relationship. He plied her with presents and seduced her. Betrayed her trust. She used to believe she was in love with him. She felt it was her fault that he assaulted her. That she’d led him on. She’s almost eighteen years old and she’s never dated. She didn’t go to her senior prom. She’s never had any kind of normal, healthy relationship with someone her own age and that’s his fault.

“Although it happened on her fourteenth birthday, I’d like to point out to the board that she was born on July nineteenth at eight-thirty in the evening. So in fact, when he raped her, technically, she wasn’t even fourteen. She was thirteen. And he stole her virginity on a desk in a dirty garage. He robbed her of her innocence and she’ll never be able to get that back.”

Brenda was crying by the end. So was I. I didn’t care what Brenda said, but I loved Wavy and I’d lost her, and I wasn’t even allowed to say that. When the parole board head asked, “Mr. Barfoot, would you like to answer Mrs. Newling?” I couldn’t even say, “I lost the best thing that ever happened to me.” Wasn’t that punishment enough?

I said, “I’m really sorry for what I did. I know that doesn’t change it, but I really am sorry. I wish I could take it back.”

Some days I was sorry. Other days I was only sorry Liam got himself killed. Another few days and Wavy woulda been my wife. Before my parole hearing the two things were about equal, the same number of days feeling each way, but when the door never opened and Wavy never walked in, the scale tipped. If she wouldn’t come see me on the one day she could have, I’d done a terrible thing.