All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (33 page)

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.