Peter’s father freaked out. He screamed, “I think we’ve seen enough of this!” and turned it off. Then I was faced with two angry, conservative faces. Rick’s was red. Sandy looked concerned, as though she wasn’t sure I was mentally capable of standing trial. Peter, who had been right beside me, had vanished. “I didn’t remember that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“How could you not remember?” his father screamed. I was not used to other people’s parents screaming at me. My own parents had been easy enough. When they’d yelled, I walked away. Sandy shook her head. Jake came to my rescue.
“C’mon, Dad, I’m sure the whole movie isn’t like that. Sometimes movies start out like. .” but Rick was pissed. An hour ago we were allies and he was caring and loving, and now he was enraged. My face was frozen in a question mark. I didn’t understand. On the edge of my peripheral vision, I saw Peter in the bedroom. His back was turned so I couldn’t gesture for him to come out and save me. Bastard. I wanted to say, “That was just the credits. It’s not porn.” I didn’t say anything except, “I’m sorry.”
Then anger. I was angry with Peter, who should have shielded me from his parents. I was angry with his parents for making me feel like an asshole. I was angry with the movie. I was mostly angry with myself for suggesting anything. Why put yourself in the line of fire? I was only trying to put on a stupid movie so we could have a fucking pleasant time, and these people were acting like I had ripped up a Bible. Hadn’t his father’s whole Thanksgiving prayer been about not judging? Didn’t Jesus hang out with some whore?
Grace put on a nature documentary. “I have to go out,” I said, and made Peter come with me.
Outside, I let him have it. “This is your house. These are your parents. What the fuck? You just leave me there?”
“Why didn’t you follow me into the bedroom?” he asked.
“That’s weird. You’re weird. You were supposed to stand up for me. I didn’t know you were going to get up and leave like that! And then I was stuck there and they were screaming.”
“I’m sorry. My dad was being a jerk.”
“I bet they wish I were this white girl with a cross around my neck who has conservative white parents. I will always be, like, ‘the other.’”
“I’m going to talk to him. They were wrong to do that, but they’re not racist.” He hugged me. “Why would you bring that movie?”
“I swear that must be the only sex scene, if you can even call it that. All it showed was a married couple fooling around. How is that unchristian?”
Everyone in the room was an adult, so what was the problem? Was the problem that people made movies like that? I didn’t understand who they were fighting for and what the fight was about. The movie had already been made. Sometimes I wished I could have talked to them openly about these ultra-Christian beliefs, just so I could wrap my mind around them.
Sandy left a Post-it on the sliding glass door. “I’m sorry, but we’re prudes.” Wasn’t much of an apology.
From then until recorded history ended, I could never recommend a movie again.
I took my last three Xanaxes. Oblivion. Sleep.
~ ~ ~
I sat up and took a long gulp of warm, flat seltzer from the uncapped bottle on the coffee table.
I was going to see Ogden today.
After digging through pockets and looking in books, I found half a bag of dope from the night before. Elizabeth had told me methadone stayed in your system for three to five days and blocked the effects of the dope. Thanksgiving was only three or four days ago. It was a waste to take it.
I snorted two fat lines off an Easton leather-bound copy of Moby-Dick with a rolled fifty. I didn’t feel less or more like shit.
Peter’s father called after we’d gotten back home. He said he was sorry. He had prayed about it, and he realized he shouldn’t have judged me. Sandy’s fingerprints were all over the phone call. God bless her sweet heart. I imagined her saying, “You really should call her and apologize.” She probably felt like if she alienated me she would be alienating her own son. It still took a lot for a grown man to call up his son’s wife, whom he had been living in sin with before they eloped in Vegas, and say he was sorry. It was like when your mother cried. All of a sudden, whatever justification you had for whatever shitty thing you had done disappeared.
After he apologized, there was an awkward silence.
“How are the goats?”
“Great. The mother gave birth. Goats aren’t the brightest animals,” he said.
“How dumb are they?” I said, in that cheesy comedian way. He didn’t laugh. He thought I was just suddenly talking like a silly man. It really would be better if I stopped talking all together.
Peter appeared in his running shorts with the elastic waistband, the ones that always made me think of his cock somewhere in there, curled up. Men with their stupid balls always hanging there. When they run, their balls must bounce a little, and when they pee and shake it, the pee couldn’t all come off, so there must always be little spots of pee on their underwear.
“Love you, hon. Text me and let me know what happened at the doctor’s, okay?” he said before he left.
His kiss felt like nothing. The same thing that used to get the serotonin charging through my body left me empty.
“Be back soon.” Door slam. The ring stood in the air for a minute.
Last week I watched Peter stand in front of a mirror and put his sunglasses on different points of his nose for fifteen minutes, and I thought, This is the person I am spending the rest of my life with.
I watched Peter pick his nose. I watched Peter really itch his ass, like get all up in there. I watched Peter burn warts off his feet. I watched him spread mayonnaise and hot sauce and peanut butter on a single piece of bread and eat it.
Droplets of sweat ran down Peter’s nose as we lay in bed and watched Stephen Colbert.
Once, Peter got angry and said he wondered why I didn’t get bedsores because he hardly ever saw me move. I knew by the way he said it he had thought it a million times.
The bottom of the bathtub was grimy and sticky because the water took forever to drain. The hot water made me feel cold and then warm. Soaped up my chest and stomach and face. Got soap in my eye. Stung. Imagined the rabbits the Johnson & Johnson people tortured Clockwork Orange—style with soap just so they knew you couldn’t go blind that way. Soaped up my pussy, legs, and ass. Wished I had a cock. I had to rub myself on stuff. Bet it would be fun to jerk off in the shower. Took the razor and put my leg up on the side of the tub, shaved, and then shaved the other one. My sinuses started to clear. I blew snot out of my nose. Shaved the outside of my pussy, covered my clit with a finger and shaved inside at the top where there was always hair and inside the lips and then all the way through the middle and then all inside the ass. Kept feeling with my fingers for those stubborn hairs I had to keep going over. The water felt like someone spitting at me.
The bikini area was a bitch. Ingrown hairs or razor burn. Those lucky bitches back in the seventies could let it all grow out into a giant bush.
Sometimes the present seemed just as dumb as the past if you imagined what it would sound like in the future: In ancient times, the female would rub a bladed tool over her genitalia to slice the hair growing from the body even with the surface of the skin, from where it would grow again. I plugged in the laptop and brought it from the coffee table to the couch to watch porn.