Slut Lullabies Read online

  An arm on my shoulder. I whirled around, terrified, as though one of the roaches had grown to monster size—I yelped. But it was only Tony Guidubaldi, in my mother’s striped terry cloth robe, his hand circling my shoulder blade like a broken wing he hoped he could repair. “Whatsa matter, babe?” he asked. “You have a bad dream? You lookin’ for your ma?” But I burst away and ran the few steps back to my room, hopping into my sweat-sticky bed, listening to the caller on the radio say, I was saved seven years ago but my son . . . I waited for my mother to come and find out what was wrong—she must have heard me in the hall—but she never arrived. In the morning, Tony Guidubaldi was gone, and after that Mom started letting me spend weekends with Sera. Her parents took us on long drives to the Michigan Dunes, cruising in their green Nova for quaint coffee shops in Cherry Valley, where one could obtain the world’s best apple pie. Years later, I said to my mother, “When you were dating Tony Guidubaldi,” and she said, “Don’t be crazy. We never dated—he’s married. We were just good friends.”

  There are some memories that come from a kind of archetype of human suffering: the fear of falling; the hopelessness of trapped limbs thrashing everywhere in a dark, confined space; the itching sting of fire. I went through a stage where I loved all the made-for-TV junkie movies, imagining each addict was my father, and maybe, maybe I have transposed his image, his strap, his slap, on a picture I saw long ago: just actors playing a part. Not my father. Not my mother’s face. There are memories that do not belong to us, no matter how real they seem. But for a week, Tony Guidubaldi’s watch sat on my mother’s bureau, and the following weekend, it just disappeared. There are memories that will always be ours, no matter how hard we will them to go away.

  Sera had chased me to the bathroom, where I was leaning, weeping over a sink like I might throw up. “Emmy,” she pleaded, “it’s no big deal. So what about your mom? She’s not like that anymore, and you’re not her—for God’s sake, you’re a virgin—”

  “I’ve been screwing Alex for half a year!” I screamed. “We go at it everywhere—parking lots at night, the bathroom at work the minute George goes on an errand, the elevator at UIC after orientation. You have no idea—you don’t know anything about me!”

  “Oh, you’re lying just to piss me off,” she said rationally. “You’d never do that; you’re totally scared of guys. Besides, we made a pact. You swore.”

  “Duh,” I said. “I fucking lied.”

  Even after she’d torn out of the bathroom, I lingered, sniveling and dwelling on my misery. I was just like my mother, who was dying alone at thirty-nine, jobless in a roach-infested apartment we could only afford because she’d boned the landlord for years, along with every other neighborhood asshole. None of them came around now. None of them would probably even show up at her wake, though maybe I’d get it for free if she’d fucked any of the Ragos who owned the funeral parlor. I would spend my college years letting Alex buy me things, shaking my shoulders on dance floors trying to be somebody else while poor George jerked off nights thinking about my tits, and then Alex would marry some Greek girl just like Sera predicted, or maybe he’d come out of the closet someday, but still I’d be kicked to the side of the road as an obstruction to his Athenian pursuit of tight boy ass. I was the world’s biggest loser; I would believe anything; the first time I made a move without Sera and look what I did. I was a slut, and my mother was worse than a slut. My mother was already dead.

  Back near the bar, Sera and Alex were arguing. I approached them warily, like a tired mother having to break up the public spats of her annoying children one time too many. Alex grabbed my arm when he saw me. He was a lanky, ethereal boy with fine features, too much fashion sense about women’s clothing, and a soft, sweet voice; I had never seen him angry before. “How could you tell her about us?” he hissed in my face. “She’s the biggest gossip in the whole school. We might as well go have sex in front of my dad!”

  Sera pushed his chest. “Who do you think you are, pretty boy, Conan the Barbarian? Let go of her!”

  “Mind your own business,” Alex whined like a baby. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dork. I’m not going to tell anyone. I’m just mad that Emily broke our pact, so now you guys are going to have to make it up to me somehow.”

  “Like how?” I said. I knew she was up to something, but I wanted it to be over quickly so I could go home. Alex had the car. I had no money, as usual.

  “Well, we were supposed to lose our virginity at the same time,” Sera said. Then, with a flourish in Alex’s direction, “We vowed ages ago. But now I’m going to have to wait till I get to Madison, because there’s nobody here in Chicago I want to sleep with. I’ll have to start college a bitter virgin.” She laughed—suddenly, she did not sound bitter. “The sooner I get laid, the less likely I am to be angry that Emily is so selfish. Then I’d have a secret to keep, too.”

  “So go screw George then,” I said irritably. “He’s totally in lust with you.”

  “Eeew,” Sera said flatly. “I think not. Alex here got all the charm in the family. Alex, by the way, are you gay?”

  “Huh?” Alex said.

  “Bi, then?”

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want my best friend Emily to get AIDS. If you’re bi, I hope you use protection.”

  Alex stared at me desperately as if for help. My arm felt bruised; I looked away. I wondered if my mother had fallen asleep on the couch watching TV as usual. I wondered what kind of girl goes out partying, losing her panties in the parking lot of her high school while her bald, breastless mother falls asleep to The Tonight Show.

  “You are really cute,” Sera said to Alex. I noticed then that she had never become truly pretty—that despite her new, nice figure and smooth hair and post-braces teeth, her face was somehow already old, lacked the dewy innocence of youth. We all worshipped her for being smarter and braver than the rest of us, but guys feared her for that, too. Brains don’t go far toward getting guys in high school. Sera had never had a boyfriend—never even seemed to fool around with anyone we knew all that well. Our guy friends asked her advice about their naive, girlie-girl girlfriends while Sera collected dust like a spinster aunt. She must have hated us all: normal girls deemed stupid enough to date by the wannabe studs who were intimidated by her mind. Maybe she had a right.

  “Emily and I always share everything,” she sing-songed. My eyes bugged. I glanced at Alex, but as I’d failed to come to his rescue a moment before, he refused to meet my eyes now. “I don’t like to feel left out.”

  “Come on,” Alex laughed. “You’re never left out of anything. You know everything about everyone. What do you care what Emily does with a guy like me? I thought I was, like, totally beneath you.”

  “Well, if Emily thinks you’re so great, maybe I should reconsider. She’s a very smart girl, you know.”

  Alex didn’t even turn in my direction at this compliment—if that was what it was. His body leaned in closer to Sera, and I thought then: he is either totally not gay, or he is way smarter than I thought. Brighter than I was, apparently. Alex’s laugh was suddenly throaty; I turned away, speechless. Maybe Sera would not really go through with it—maybe she was only trying to show me what a dog Alex was—how he’d jump at the chance to put his dick in any hole, even right in front of me. I was convinced. How could I let her know? How could I beg her, right in front of him, not to take it too far?

  “So if you and Emily share something, and it’s both of your secret, then you’d keep it together and not tell anybody else, right?” His eyes were seductive—never, even in the moments before climaxing, did he look at me that way. Even under the stars, on the beach in Freeport where I lost my virginity, his eyes had been confused, ambivalent, worried. I remembered how the first time we’d tried to put a condom on his half-mast penis, it kept popping off and flying around the room, and how we chased it, naked at the shabby Tip Top
Motel on Lincoln, time and time again, until his erection was lost and the condom was dry, so we just watched videos for a couple of hours and then went home. I did not know that boy could become this man. Always, I had imagined us as partners in crime: children throwing rocks at old ladies’ windows, wild but harmless. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t known Sera capable of treachery, but Alex . . . Maybe this was why Sera would win—would always win. I did not understand people; I looked at surfaces; I believed what I wanted to believe: in a grown-up mother who would invite me into her safe bed, in Charlie’s Angels protecting me from behind my wall. Sera believed in turning human need to her advantage. And need would always win out.

  I walked out of the bar.

  George was leaning against the brick wall of the building, smoking a cigarette. I had never seen him smoke. His dark eyes were in the shadow of the neon sign; he looked like a Gothic vampire, or a detective in a 1940s film. His gaze flicked lazily over me, then back toward the distance, as though he were trying to figure out where he was supposed to be instead of here.

  “Do you have any money for a cab?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I’ll take you.”

  “What about Alex and Sera?”

  “Alex has money for a cab. You don’t. Either way, my family pays for the cab. So I’ll take you.”

  I followed him to the car. But once inside, he drove toward the cleaners, and I was confused. George lived above the cleaners, and Alex and his parents lived in the building next door. I’d crashed at George’s on numerous occasions, on the couch, when it was really late or I was too drunk to go home. But it was only midnight, and all the drama had sobered me. I said, “I don’t think Alex expects me to come back here or anything. I was planning to just go home.”

  “It’s easier this way,” he said. “We’ll take you back in the morning.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I felt dangerously near crying again, but George was not the sort of person one easily cried around—it was obvious he would think me frivolous and immature, and he might even mock me. I chewed on the inside of my mouth and ventured, “Um, Alex and I kind of had an argument.”

  “Yeah, I know. My brother’s a spoiled asshole.”

  I gulped.

  He took me to his apartment. I was not so clueless as to fail to consider that he might be trying to get me into bed on the strength of my anger at his brother. But he just handed me a glass of water and left me in the living room, heading to his own bedroom without any attempt at friendly conversation, which was typical. Normally, Alex smuggled me over some blankets and a pillow when I stayed the night, but George hadn’t offered. The couch was covered in plastic and would be uncomfortable without a sheet over it—I curled up on the floor with a sofa pillow and a stiff afghan. Horizontal, my drunkenness returned; the room spun a little. Maybe I was just plowed, and that was why I had reacted so strongly to Sera’s comments about Mom. After all, she wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know on some level. Maybe I was even drunk enough to have misinterpreted what was going on between Sera and Alex: maybe they were only fucking with me. Maybe Alex would turn up later and spoon me in his arms and say he and Sera had taken separate cabs. Maybe Sera would call my house in the morning and, in her Noël Coward accent, accuse, “Can’t you take a bloody joke?”

  I couldn’t take a joke. That had always been a shortcoming of mine. This reassured me as I lulled into a hazy, drunken sleep.

  In truth, I must have passed out. I only came to when he tried to enter me. Then my body screamed awake, squirming, jerking in protest, but George’s heavy arms, hot from contact and rage and want, bore down upon my bones. He used one hand to guide his rigid penis in, the other arm bent across my chest and bearing all his weight so I gasped for air, my arms flailing like dying snakes, unable to strike. His knees ground into my thighs, holding them apart. Once he was up me, he pushed himself onto both arms, grappling with me briefly as I struck at him, but soon my wrists were in his hands, gripped tight and pushed into the plush carpeting while he pumped into me and I shrieked, then begged, then finally murmured listlessly, “Stop, no.” He, too, had been drinking, so his act was perhaps neither as satisfying nor as quick as he’d intended. Near the end he started muttering frantically, “Shit, shit, come on!” By the time he climaxed, I was sobbing in pain.

  The spasms of the climax seemed to reassure him. “I’ll stand up to my father,” he groaned into my neck as they shook him. “Forget about Alex, he’s a pussy. I have more money than he does, anyway. Ahhh, you feel so warm.”

  I did not bolt for the door when he let go of my wrists, when he rolled off my throbbing legs. My skirt and tights were around my ankles in an indecipherable tangle, my shirt pushed up to my chin, breasts hanging out of my bra so the wires stabbed my tender skin. Semen leaked onto the afghan his mother had made. The clock on the side table indicated that almost four hours had transpired since we’d arrived here and I’d first passed out. Had he slept, too, or spent that time watching me, fantasizing, planning?

  George fell asleep on the floor, clutching me. It surprised me, more than anything, that he had not invited me to his bed, so clear was it that this rape had, in his mind, heralded our new romantic relationship. He and Sera and Alex had played a hand of cards, and with a quick reshuffling I was now his. I wept silently while my body went numb and slick under his sweating arm. I did not move until daylight made my nudity unbearable, and I scurried to the bathroom to wash up and rearrange my clothes.

  When I reentered the room, George was sitting up. He offered me orange juice, and I took it and drank it without speaking. While he drove me home, he was silent as usual, but before I got out of the car he said, “We’ll go to a movie and dinner on Friday. Alex and Sera can accompany us if you like. Think of a restaurant you want to try . . . but none of that raw fish or Ethiopian mush you girls like.”

  I did not slam the door.

  Approaching my front door under George’s gaze, if I thought anything it was, I always knew this would happen. Not him, not last night’s exact scenario, but that prickly sensation on the back of my neck when I found myself in a parking lot alone after dark, or in the deserted restroom of an office building, or when a strange man walked behind me on the street. My fear was the ancient archetype for all women: the knowledge, intrinsic in our flesh, that we can be violated at any time. Now it had happened. It did not occur to me, not once, to call the police—to tell anyone at all. While it would be wrong to say I felt anything resembling relief, it might be accurate to say that, finally, I could stop waiting. From now on my life would exist, like my mother’s, on the other side.

  In the living room, Mom was still asleep under our own afghan, which was light and worn from years and store-bought. The TV was off. I sat down at her feet; her toenails were painted seashell pink, but the polish was peeling, her nails growing out. She had several purple splotches on her legs—she bruised easily now. Her head was wrapped in the turban she wore at home; she did not take it off except to shower. Although I was her daughter, and we had lived in this house alone together forever, we were not symbiotic enough that she was comfortable showing me her bald head. Whenever I saw it by accident, I felt a queasy horror akin to remembering my father shooting up, or seeing Tony Guidubaldi’s bare feet in our roach infested hall that by rights belonged to him.

  I touched my mother’s leg, and she opened her eyes and looked at me, but not with any joy at seeing my face, or worry at the expression of pain I wore. Her eyes had gone blank a long time ago. Or maybe I didn’t wear any expression of pain, anyway. Maybe my eyes were blank, too. Then, abruptly, below her dead eyes, she smiled.

  And suddenly, I could not imagine why I had been so angry at Sera for what she’d said about my mother’s past. The clarity of that fury drained from me, and I couldn’t remember what was so bad—so inexcusably shameful—about being the neighborhood slut, anyway. With an intensity so rough it doubled me over, I missed the long-past squeaking of my mother’s bed, the muffled
, complicit adult laughter that excluded me, that rhythmic pounding on the wall our bedrooms shared—the lullaby of my youth. I longed for those days when my mother was still invincible, when I was proud of her for not being like me, but like those brazen girls on the corner who owned our small world. I wanted more than anything to escape the brutal, glaring truths of adulthood: That I never liked those girls, with their gang member boyfriends. That had we grown up together, my mother and I would not have been friends. That my mother never knew me; Sera was the one who understood. That they had both betrayed me. And the fact that I had betrayed them, too, with my secrets, my desertion, didn’t help. I was alone. Mothers die. College, with neither my best friend nor my first love, loomed.

  “Did Sera call?” I asked, though it was only eight in the morning. Before Mom could answer, I blurted, “You know what? I don’t think we should answer the phone today. Let’s just spend some time together, you and me. Let’s not talk to anyone else.”

  “But what if your boyfriend calls, hon?” Mom said groggily. “It’s Saturday. Isn’t he gonna want to take you out?” She closed her eyes. I wanted to shout: Don’t!