air moves into my blouse and I ‘1”sihl, sign, feel the skin on his back, how it falls into the spine, like waterfalls into a riverbed, my fingers boats traveling up the stream of his vertebrae and for a second I feel like I’m safe from myself. Panic lifts into kites. I ask him again. I need to go, I mumble, but now he just says, Come here Mona Gray, and leans back on the bed, takes me down with him.
When his shirt is off there’s no part of him I find better than the burns up and down his arms and I am kissing them over and over. This is where he melts, this is his bathroom trip, and he says to me: You don’t have to do that, it is ugly there, and I say: I think it’s beautiful, and he doesn’t believe me still and so I whisper how Danny brought in the severed arm to class as a i and the parents rioted but I thought it was wonderful, sealed in blue glass like that, the palm opened like a bud, and he starts laughing and laughing until his voice gets ragged and I can feel the room shift, the whole room is keeping us, and I ask him again because I can, because I am starting to have the smallest, most precious glimmer of trust; I say: I still have to go to the bathroom. His laughter is quieter now because I have been kissing each finger, each burn, each whorl, each cut, and he says: Too bad Mona Blue Green Gray because I am the bathroom monitor and you are not allowed to leave this bed. Lather drains into the sink, thinning. I make a move to leave but his hand clamps over my wrist and I say: I want to go NOW, but his hand is a brace and I slam against it. His fingers chafe my wrist. Pull harder. Pull.
His hand is strong. I pull as hard as I can, throw the weight of my whole body against his hand, more, and I never get to do this, I never
pull as hard as I can, I always pull less hard than I can just in case, but here I am straining, feet braced against the bed for leverage, and his hand is strong and wiry and I say: Let Me Go! and he is laughing at me and he says: You keep trying if you want but I will not let you go. I will not let you go.
My father was a track star in college and I was a track star in high school but I never ran against him, I never ran until I won, and that is the child’s job, to have the one day where I run faster than my track-star father and the scepter gets passed and the trophy changes rooms. I wasn’t fast enough at age nine; I was much faster at age sixteen, but by then he was grayed and quiet and gone. I have never really raced him and I never will race him; he can’t race; he gets too tired and he once told me he doesn’t like it if his heart beats so fast-that thumping, the insistence-I hate it, he said. So I stopped when he stopped. You faded, said Mr. Jones, blowing on his 42. Faded, faded, faded.
You dropped off the number chart, he said. Now, the science teacher is right beside me, right here, fingers clamped on my wrist, saying: This is it? This is how hard you can pull? This is it? You’re WEAK, he says to me and I start laughing, loud, and I am pulling against his hand as hard as I can and he’s pulling back and the lamplight from outside the window is flickering over his skin like fire. I’m still laughing, barking, and I choke it out again: Bathroom, I say, but it’s a joke now and he just says:
Pee in the bed then bucko.
In the next room, the soap is a quiet dry stone. He uses both arms and brings me up on the bed, pulls me on top of him.
Everything slows down. His skin is warm. The room is awake.
In high school, we lined up at the starting line together, eight of us side by side, coltish and muscled. Shoes like slippers.
Stomachs full of wise breakfasts. Eyes clear, eye whites milky.
When the gun went off, it always took me a millisecond to remember what was happening. Bam. Boom. Go. The others would get ahead, the numbers on their backs moving up and down, 5, 11, 98, 42-I’d watch them moving. 50,20–40, io. My stride took three strides to catch, but then, like a machine engaging, it rolled forward: leg after leg after leg after leg. The numbers floated ahead of me and they were like a beacon, a beckon, flat and hard, black and clean, and I’d pass them and the track would curve and I’d lean and push forward, past the air, past the noise, past the movement. Past everybody.
The clothes come off. His wrist bones are sharp.
My father sat in the bleachers, wearing a hat against the sun. He always brought me a water afterward and I pretended I was happy to see him. I said, Thanks for coming Dad and Thanks for the water Dad and I talked and chatted and talked and kept talking so I wouldn’t accidentally open my mouth and do the thing I felt which was to call him a quitter.
Benjamin’s fingers move over me. He tells me something about my
shoulders. I tell him something about his back. I can’t leave the room. I’m not allowed to leave the room. We shift and roll over. I stop smiling.
Breathe in. The room gets darker. Hands.
In the locker room, I unlaced my shoes. I got a lot of congratulation hugs. The coach walked over, her lipstick stretched and wrinkled from beaming, and told me I beat my own record. She waited for me to react but I just pulled off my shoes one at a time and piled them into the steel-smelling locker. I don’t want to beat my own record, I told her.
His hands are on my face and we’re wrapped around each other then and it’s slow and silent and intent, nothing fancy, nothing new;
if people were watching in the movie theater they’d file out to the box office, demanding their money back, bored. What’s going on with those two, they’d say, they are just taking their own sweet time, aren’t they.
His thighs. The stream up his spine. The thin paper of his eye lid. The hair smell of his hair. The absurd asinine inane idiotic perfect simplicity of the fit.
On the clock, the red digital lines, wickedly bright, shuffle and restructure: 11:59; click: 12:00. Only the movement of three numbers at once makes me blink and notice: midnight. Tomorrow.
Sunday. Which means it is my father’s birthday. Which means he is 51 years old. And inside all the dizziness, Benjamin’s eyes closed, mine open to darkness, the air in my chest thickening to a wheeze, warriors with weapons overtaking my body, distant movement getting closer, I think for a second that I am Joanna Stuart, the caboose of the family, taking off my clothes, melding skin with a boy in a Florida bed, and she thinks, as she pushes her hips down into his, I’m still here, she thinks, I have been here the whole time, haven’t I, and the broom thought that finally sweeps me away is just that I am young. I am younger.
I am supposed to outlive them both.
he next afternoon, I spent an hour downtown at the bookstore picking out a book for my father. I considered something on skin disease and then another book on TV movies and something else on effective gardening but I kept returning to a big beautiful photo album of runners, black-and-white images, in the steel colors that make athletes gleam like statues. I carried it around the store for a while, bought it, and walked home with my arms around the wide cover. My body felt tired and calm. I’d sent the science teacher home in the morning, before noon, after we spent over an hour in bed talking about every kid in the school and I laughed so hard at his imitation of Danny O’Mazzi I had to go to the bathroom to pee and he followed me in, saying: You’re still not allowed to go to the bathroom, and I twisted, laughing, said:
This is for real, and he nodded and went to have some cereal. I peed,
then washed my P‘8ihle s’ bgn Of 11 % hands with shampoo. The soap was in the soap dish and looked, at that moment, the size of a piece of soap.