The Brutal Language of Love (2 page)

“Do you remember anything about my penis?” Shipley asked her on the hillside one evening. The pollen count had been high that day, and they were passing a bottle of nasal spray back and forth.

“Not really,” Beatrice said.

“Wow,” he said.

“Yup,” she said. “Imagine that.”

“Hey, why did your boyfriend dump you?”

“Why?”

Shipley nodded.

“He was jealous of you,” Beatrice said.

“He knows me?”

“He's been watching us,” she confirmed.

This silenced Shipley for some time. It was a Sunday during finals, and the campus was deserted. “Would you like to see my penis?” he asked.

She looked over at his crotch. “Is it anything special?”

“I think so,” he said.

She nodded. He took it out. “Okay,” she said. “I saw it.”

“It doesn't ring a bell?”

“No.” She passed him the nasal spray.

He inhaled deeply, pinching the side of his empty nostril. “If I left it out,” he said, sniffling, “would you do anything with it?”

“Probably not.”

“Because I raped you?”

“Probably.”

He put it away. “My mother thinks you should go for counseling,” he said as he zipped up his fly.

“Why?”

“She says I raped you and you need to face that reality.”

“I already did,” she said.

“You're supposed to get mad, though.”

“I'm busy,” she said. “Doesn't your mother know anger is unproductive?”

“Is there anything that would make you want to make love with me again?”

“Yes,” she said.

“What is it?” he asked eagerly, but she said she didn't know.

She failed out of school and lost her student
loans. They hired her back at the cheap clothing store, where she felt oddly invigorated by her co-workers' discussions of impostor perfumes and patio furniture. Shipley picked her up in the evenings in his VW van and drove her to the college, where they continued to lie on the grass and take medication. He told her if they got married people would give them money and small appliances. “I'm tired of trading,” she said, and she fell asleep.

On a Tuesday in May, Fetko came into the clothing store with his wife. Summer was slow in retail, and so it was just Beatrice, her manager having stepped out for lunch. Fetko seemed startled to see her and immediately told his wife he didn't think she would find anything she liked here, but she told him to sit down in the chair by the dressing room and wait. “What do you know anyway?” she said, and so Fetko shuffled past Beatrice at the cash register, his eyes glued to the floor.

Beatrice watched him for a moment, thinking about how most male professors his age—maybe fifty—still dressed as if it were 1974. She thought how amazing it was that young, stylish women of the nineties managed to get crushes on them anyway, as if age and intelligence transcended fashion. She had never had a crush on Fetko, and suddenly regretted this. He was a depressed, inappropriate, badly dressed man, and all she had ever noticed was his grade book, his red pencil.

Beatrice approached his chair now, which was puce where it wasn't threadbare. “Can I offer you a magazine or something to drink, sir?” she asked. She had no magazine or drinks. It was a cheap store. But she was stirred by his grief and did not want it to end.

“No thanks,” he said. Then he added, “Miss.”

Beatrice nodded. “I'll just help your wife then,” she said, and walked off.

Mrs. Fetko was stout and seemed drawn to a group of coordinating, boxy separates done up in feminine, floral prints. “May I say you have lovely skin, ma'am,” Beatrice began, which was the truth. Mrs. Fetko laughed and reached into her purse for a business card. “Here's my secret, hon,” she said, handing it to Beatrice.
FULL BODY MASSAGE BY JULES,
it read. “You can keep it,” she added. “Now, what do you think about this?” She held up a pink-and-gray blouse and a matching gray skirt.

“Is there a special occasion?” Beatrice asked.

“My husband works up at the college and he was just awarded an endowed chair. Very impressive. So I need something to wear to the ceremony. How about this?” She had laid the pink group over her arm and was now into the teals.

Beatrice shrugged. “They're just the same exact things in different colors.”

Mrs. Fetko laughed. “Tell it like it is! I love it. Here. Start a dressing room for me, babe.”

Beatrice took the clothes from her and headed toward the back of the store, where Fetko was furiously examining a dry-cleaning receipt from his wallet. She put Mrs. Fetko's clothes in a cubicle and said, “Congratulations,” when she came back out.

He looked up from his receipt blankly.

“On your award,” Beatrice added.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

“Of course I do,” he hissed. “Please!”

“Just wondering,” she said.

Mrs. Fetko tried on several outfits, none of which was any better or worse than the others. When she asked Fetko which one he liked best, he said he didn't know. She pressed him and he said, “The pink, okay?”

“Don't be such an ass, Fetko,” she said, rolling her eyes at Beatrice before returning to the dressing room.

“What are
you
looking at?” Fetko asked Beatrice after his wife had gone.

“Nothing,” she said.

He glanced at the dressing rooms, then back at Beatrice. “Say something good to me,” he whispered, laying a hand across his groin. “Quick.”

She said something. He closed his eyes and smiled a little, the way he used to do. “Say something else,” he said, and she did.

In return he offered her nothing. There were no more grades left, no student loans. Furthermore, he had clearly come to understand that she wouldn't retaliate. She had never once complained about the D he had given her, never hinted she even
knew
of the trouble she could cause him. And now here he was, looking to gratify himself at her expense. Asking for a freebie. She had complied not out of fear or hopefulness, but rather gratitude, for at last she felt herself to be depleted, empty, and in need.

In the van on the way home she
told Shipley she loved him. “Will we make love?” he asked hopefully.

“Probably not,” she said. “It's not that kind of love.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, maybe you could stop making love with everybody else.”

“I'll think about it,” she said.

“Really?” he asked.

“Sure.”

They drove through town without saying much more. The old van heaved and lurched while Shipley coaxed it on for one more mile, up one more city hill. Beatrice noticed a woman at a bus stop wearing a dress from her store, and pointed this out to Shipley, who said she didn't look half bad from a distance. “My mother likes your store,” he said. “She said she may come in this weekend.”

Beatrice considered protesting but then remembered that the shop was a public place. “What does your mother look like?” she asked instead.

Shipley thought for a minute before saying, “My father,” which was of no help whatever.

Later, on the way to the college, Beatrice felt herself wanting more to eat than just medicine, and mentioned as much to Shipley. They planned an elaborate evening of food and drink, then stopped off for ice cream before dinner. It was very wrong of them, and it tasted very good.

my mother promised to take me shopping after the
car was fixed, so that was how I found myself sitting next to her at the mechanic's that morning, reading over her shoulder as she wrote a letter to my Aunt Mitzy saying I was still fat. “Hey, you can't write that!” I said, pointing to the sentence about me with an orange fingertip. We were sitting in the small office beside the garage, where people popped in to pay for gas or buy themselves a snack for the road. I had just eaten two bags of Chee-tos myself and was considering a third when I saw my name in my mother's fine hand.

“Oh,” my mother said, acting as if she hadn't just written it. “You're right, Roz.” She began crossing it out and her face turned red. She was pretty embarrassed, which shocked me, since I figured she would turn the tables on me and say something like “Well! You shouldn't have been reading a private letter over my shoulder!” Even though I knew she would go home and finish it later (rewriting the crossed-out part and telling Aunt Mitzy how touchy I had gotten about it), I felt kind of powerful. When we went clothes shopping that afternoon, I hardly noticed I was the only thirteen-year-old in the misses department flipping through the size sixteen rack.

We got home before dinner, so I put on my snow clothes and crossed Hermitage Road, where they were putting up a new development—one much nicer than ours. Several foundations had already been dug and were now half-filled with snow, while a forklift sat abandoned in an empty lot. There were cement blocks piled up all over the place, metal barrels filled with construction trash, and a short row of Porta Pottis. The door to one was open and inside I found a picture of a half-naked woman in a skimpy Santa Claus outfit taped to the wall. I took it down and put it in my pocket for Jennings, who was at his grandmother's for the weekend.

It was hard work running around in the snow. Each time I hopped down into one of the foundations, it took me forever to pull myself back out again. I saw this as a challenge—another way to burn more calories, which was why I was out there in the first place. When I got home and the scale said I had only lost a pound, I thought it should have been more.

Mom and I ate spaghetti with Ragú for dinner. We usually made that or Old El Paso tacos, or else we went to McDonald's. We had eaten more natural foods when Jonquil was still living with us since she liked to cook, but now that she was gone Mom said it was crazy to go to that kind of trouble for just two people. Mom said it was on Jonquil's head that I had gotten so damn fat, and she hoped my sister could live with that.

After dinner Mom left to spend the night with her beau, a retired army sergeant who felt that any of the four branches of the military would serve to set Jonquil straight. I had a job baby-sitting for the two Hermann boys. We made a deal that I would let them stay up as late as they wanted as long as they didn't tell on me for smoking their parents' cigarette butts. Once the boys had fallen asleep in front of the TV, I carried them upstairs, put them to bed, and called my sister.

My mother had kicked her out the year before for becoming unruly. Jonquil, who had been seventeen at the time, moved in with her boyfriend, Vic, and got pregnant. She and Vic made plans to marry but then Jonquil had a miscarriage and they called the wedding off. The family was relieved, which so infuriated Jonquil (since she had suffered such pain), that she put the wedding back on again. Her bridal gown was her senior prom dress, while Vic, who was reedy and slack-jawed, borrowed one of his father's suits. I cried like a fool at the ceremony because now I knew there was no chance in hell Jonquil was ever coming back to us. Aunt Mitzy and my mother told me not to worry—that Vic was an inbred and it wouldn't last—and for once I was glad about how nasty they got when they were together.

Jonquil knew everything about sex and she taught it to me. She said she didn't want me to end up marrying a screwball like Vic just to prove a point, like she had. She said this right in front of him, on the weekends when I went to stay with them in their apartment, and he just laughed like she was telling a joke. He kissed her, too, and I watched as both their mouths opened and their tongues came out, all rude and wet. I could watch them kiss for hours and, in fact, sometimes that was what ended up happening.

But Jonquil wasn't kidding, and what I knew that Vic didn't was that she was going to leave him as soon as she saved up enough money. He was pursuing an art degree at a community college, which Jonquil described as “double jeopardy.” Meanwhile, she supported both of them on her receptionist's salary from Dr. Flay, the TV hypnotist. He didn't perform on TV but he ran a lot of ads describing how he could stop people from smoking, overeating, or a combination of the two. He was a blond, handsome man, and sometimes, my sister told me, spoke to his clients in a made-up foreign accent. As an employee, Jonquil was entitled to a 50 percent discount on his services, and since he liked her so much (feeling her natural thinness made him look like a success), he extended that privilege to her family and friends. I had saved up some baby-sitting money, so when I called Jonquil that night from the Hermanns' house, it was to ask her to make me an appointment.

“What for?” she said.

“Because,” I said. “Mom wrote and told Aunt Mitzy I was fat.”

Jonquil made a light blowing sound.

“Are you smoking again?” I asked her.

“Uh-huh.”

“But I thought Dr. Flay cured you.”

“He did,” Jonquil said. “I just forgot to say the key word before I went to the grocery store and it screwed me up. I bought a pack.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway,” Jonquil said, “when I was your age, Mom wrote and told Aunt Mitzy I was a tramp, so don't worry about it.”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why did she say you were a tramp?”

“Don't be such a dumb ass, Roz.”

“Sorry,” I said. I blew smoke from one of Mrs. Hermann's cigarette butts. I could tell it was hers from the purple lipstick on the filter tip.

“What's that noise?” Jonquil asked me.

“Nothing. I was just sighing.”

Eventually she gave in and made me an appointment for that week. I sat in a dentist's chair while Dr. Flay indeed spoke softly in an accent that reminded me of Count Dracula. He dimmed the lights and projected a small red dot on the white wall in front of me, which I was to focus on intently. Meanwhile Dr. Flay stood behind me, massaging my temples and telling me I was getting sleepy, even though I wasn't. I felt bad for him that he was doing such a terrible job, so I played along, making my eyelids bob up and down when he came around front to see how I was doing.
“Thaht's eet,”
he said.
“Thaht's eet.”

With my eyes now closed, Dr. Flay spoke frankly to me about the state of my body, saying I had three rolls of fat on my stomach, and wouldn't it be nicer to have just one? He said I had a pretty face, like my sister's, but that a double chin on a seventh grader was nothing short of heinous. He noted that my thighs squashed together so tightly as to be prohibitive, which I didn't understand, and then asked me point-blank how I thought I would ever get a boyfriend. I wanted to bring up Jennings then, but I was supposed to be hypnotized and so kept my mouth shut. It alarmed me somewhat that Dr. Flay's voice was getting closer and closer, so I took a quick peek. He stood directly in front of me with his hand on his groin. I shut my eyes immediately but it was too late; he had seen me. He dropped his accent, gave me my key word (which would remind me of our session and instantly decrease my appetite), and snapped his fingers. I assumed this meant I could open my eyes, and I did. Dr. Flay wished me luck and gave me a bill for fifty dollars, to be paid in cash to my sister.

On the way home Jonquil and I stopped at a Wendy's drive-thru. I said
hiccup
and she said
lizard,
and we neither overate nor smoked. “Do you think I'll really get thin?” I asked her as we sat in the parking lot, eating our baked potatoes. Jonquil didn't want to eat in the dining room because it was nonsmoking and if her key word hadn't worked, she would have been screwed.

A section of her long brown hair dipped into her potato, and she tucked it behind her ear, sucking the nonfat sour cream from the ends. “It's hard to say,” she said. “The data are inconclusive.”

Jonquil dropped me off at the end of my driveway, then spun her tires on the ice for a couple of seconds, trying to peel out. When I got inside, my mother said my sister had no manners, coming and going like that without so much as a hello, and demanded I agree with her on this point. I did so reluctantly, after which she further demanded my key word. I lied and said it was
Sputnik,
which we had just learned about that day in social studies. She had taco meat for Old El Paso simmering on the stove and asked suspiciously if I was hungry. I said no and she beamed. It was nice, being able to make her happy for once, so I didn't bother mentioning Wendy's.

I finished my homework quickly, then ran across the street to see Jennings, whose bedroom light was on. His mother, a handsome divorcee who wore high heels and a small brunette hairpiece at the crown of her head, answered the door. “Well,” she said, “don't you have pink cheeks! The cold agrees with you, Roslyn.” She told me Jennings was in his room and to go on up. I think she thought we couldn't possibly be making love since I was so overweight and Jennings was sort of handsome, but we were.

We had been making love since a few months before, when I had beaten Jennings at the spelling bee. I was the best speller in school, while Jennings was second best, and when I got ejected early for misspelling
quietus,
I could tell he thought he had the whole thing wrapped up. After losing, however, I went to the library to see what the word meant, and found the main pronunciation to be qui-
ee
-tus, not qui-
ay
-tus, as Mrs. Googan had said. My face burned with injustice. Had she not been so obscure I would never have spelled it Q-U-I-A-T-U-S, and, furthermore, would still be in the running. I lugged the dictionary back to the classroom to plead my case.

Mrs. Googan was shocked and appalled. Frankly, so was I. Jennings had a lot of friends—mean friends, who were already deeply offended by my weight. It wasn't like spoiling Jennings's chance to win the bee was going to make them treat me any better. At the same time, I wasn't sure things could get all that much worse.

In the end, Mrs. Googan allowed me back into the competition and I won. After school that day, I went across the street to apologize to Jennings, for what it was worth. He lay on his bed, inconsolable. I waited for him to kick me out of his room or call me fat ass or something, but he didn't. I went over to his bed and put my arm around him, and was momentarily surprised at how easy it was to get close to a popular person. Of course, Jennings and I had grown up together, so even though he was more popular than I was at school, there was a different hierarchy in the neighborhood. All the kids I baby-sat for adored me, and even though they were several years younger, the sheer volume of them conferred upon me a vague status of local, albeit fat, hero. Jennings knew this. He could call me names and play mean tricks on me at school all he wanted, but in the neighborhood we were nearly equals.

I had spent the weekend preceding the spelling bee with Jonquil and Vic, studying the dictionary and learning what an orgasm was, and all the ways a woman could get one, if she was lucky. “Jennings,” I said that day in his room, “would you like to make love?” He stopped sniffling so much and said yes. I might not have offered except I believed his secondary sex characteristics had come in over the summer, and Jonquil told me when this happened, boys weren't so little and slippery inside you anymore.

After we had done it, Jennings thanked me and said he'd like to do it again soon. Having experienced my first orgasm with the minimum of effort, I agreed. Mostly we did it after school, before his mother got home. Then it didn't matter how noisy we were, or how long it took, or how often we wanted to do it. Through all of this, Jennings started to become a different person. In school, he was crueler to me than ever before, or so it seemed. We staged scenes where he shoved me against lockers for being so fat, then caught me just before I hurt myself and banged his own fist against the metal, so it just sounded bad. He grabbed me in front of his friends and whispered threats in my ear, which were really words of love such as,
I can't wait to see you this afternoon.
When we were alone, he told me he wanted to be a stunt coordinator when he grew up, so this was all just practice for him. He assured me constantly that my main problem was not so much that I was fat, but that I smelled bad, which I appreciated, since at least I could do something about that.

Now, standing in his doorway after returning from Dr. Flay's office, I announced, “Jennings, I've been hypnotized.” He was lying on his side in bed, looking at
Playboy.
He set the magazine aside and I could see he had an erection inside his pants. He patted the bed for me to sit down beside him, and I did. “I think I got ripped off,” I said, even though I hadn't overeaten at Wendy's.

“Why?” Jennings asked. He rolled over on his back so that his erection pitched a tent inside his khakis. That was what he called it.