LEE: So that’s pretty ominous, whatever, right there. This guy wants to fuck a beautiful, totally naive teenager but he pisses on her because she’s afraid?
GAYL: Man, I think you exaggerate. Feminists exaggerate. But whatever. I’m not gonna yet fuck with your rosy vision of all this.
§
My mother’s lips were stuck together. It was a cramped, littered patio for dinner on our third night. I thought my mother was mad at my father about our motel, the wrong timing of our trip because of American Spring Break. Not talking over dinner, though, was even worse than her being all silent and repressed. Everyone else on the patio was talking and drinking with fries in their mouths. It was like we five weren’t supposed to be sitting together but by some coincidence we just had to be. Being eighteen is freedom. All the kids on Spring Break who were humping in their rooms and drinking from buckets were barely older than Jody but they were fucking and humping and slurping from buckets. I had a huge plastic lemonade filled mostly with ice. My dad was drinking some Wild Turkey or something. My mother rolled her eyes when he’d ordered that and if she’d been speaking I knew she would’ve said something like: ‘Neil, what are you trying to prove?’
My mother was frustrated. Maybe all mothers are frustrated, as if they shit out their hopes with each kid.
‘I’m going to have fun on this vacation,’ my dad said to our waitress, who was probably twenty, white-blond, with gunked-on mascara. ‘Unlike some people who don’t know how to have fun.’ More rolling of eyes by my mother. Jody got up and left the table. The waitress left too, saying, ‘’Scuse me a sec, I forgot my pad!’
This patio had red lights strung across it and music blaring, half-Spanish, half-English. People had meat and pickles piling out of straw baskets, way-too-big plastic cups of spiked Coke. I think some of the kids were probably staring at us – this family who weren’t even looking at each other.
Our waitress came back with a redder mouth. I bit through ice.
‘Excuse him,’ my mother finally spoke. Those tight two words were granted to the waitress because my father ordered a second supersize Wild T.
The waitress, who had on suspenders over her T-shirt, laughed stupidly. ‘That’s okay, ma’am!’
I wondered what that Tanzanian guy was doing tonight. Had he had lived here for a long time? I wished that I hadn’t run out of his room. I wished I’d just stayed. What would’ve happened if I’d just fucking stayed? Would we have had sex? We were supposed to use a condom. I knew that much from Jen. She had a stash that her mother had given her when she turned fourteen. ‘Like mother, like daughter,’ Jen laughed. She showed me how to put a condom on a guy using a frozen hot dog. It was totally disgusting because the thing started melting when it was my turn, too soft to hold the condom right. We ended up flushing it all down the toilet.
‘Jesus, Neil, you’ve had enough!’
My father had tripped or something getting up from the table to help our waitress hand out our plates. They weren’t even plates, they were baskets. The waitress was laughing and apologizing and so was my dad. My mother didn’t do anything when Jeff got up to help. My dad must’ve been getting drunk. He was back in his chair, helpless with his burnt nose. Our waitress squeezed around our table in between other people’s chairs. I’d never seen my father drunk. His moustache was wet.
When I was running out of that guy’s room I heard what he said. My father took a gulp of his drink. My mother closed her eyes. It was like she didn’t have the energy to be a mother anymore, like she’d reached some kind of expiry date. Come back, you little bitch. That was what that guy had said when I was running out of his room.
I’d ordered a double-decker grilled cheese. Four triangles of white bread were stacked in my basket. The cheese inside was as orange as a pylon and glued over the sides. Little bitch. That guy called me little bitch. Jody still hadn’t returned to our table. My mother’s Caesar salad looked frozen. My father was sucking a caramel rib. I took a bite of my sandwich. Come back, little bitch. The sandwich was salty and fat. I felt something drip in my underwear.
That guy’s low voice, hunched over, his poking-out cock. Little bitch. Come back, little bitch.
I got up from the table. The musi
c popped. I passed by Jody at the payphone on the way to the bathroom. She was probably talking to her boyfriend back at home. Little bitch. I pushed into a toilet stall. I didn’t even make it to lock the door. I was all wet. Come back, little bitch. My finger felt up me. I leaned into the door. There were scratches on the walls. That guy wanted to have sex. He pissed on my back. Little bitch. Come back. I was rubbing myself. My pink bathing suit with the holes in the sides. It just took a second, I heard him calling me back. Bitch! Come back, little bitch ... A thing unfolded and surged up inside me, as if a kite flying was exploding into flames. The stall door banged. My knees went hot. That was a real orgasm! I knew that it was! I couldn’t stand, I was shaking. The door helped me up. That was what an orgasm feels like! It happened from hearing him calling me back, calling me bitch. That was how he needed me.
In the bathroom mirror, my eyes looked fucked up. I rubbed my fingers with toilet paper.
I passed by Jody who was still talking on the payphone as I went back to our table. I sat down at my basket, picked up my sandwich and ate the cheese cold. My mother glanced at me and finally she smiled.
§
My dad took breaks from the paper to locate us all. I could see him doing it, calculating: daughter plus daughter plus son plus wife. Daughter plus son plus college girl. Girl plus girl plus girl plus girl. I saw him looking at them in their bikinis. I could tell that some of them even felt it when he looked. They slithered around on their towels, hips oiled, bums up. They liked even the slittiest father eyes on them.
It was the fourth day of our family vacation. I asked my mother if everything was okay. I sat on the edge of her chair at the pool. My mom got kind of defensive, speaking too quickly. ‘Of course I’m okay. It’s just this book.’ And she slammed it shut. I saw the cover closely. Five Korean women were standing or crouching against a rock wall. Their faces were blank but they were dressed in skin-tight silk dresses, with S-shaped, high-buttoned clasps. My mom touched my shoulder. ‘You should wear sunscreen,’ she said. Then she made these little circle movements down my arm as if she was telling me to put it on in a painterly way. I didn’t ever know why my mother had stopped painting. I never asked her either, it was so hard to ask her things. I knew she’d studied painting when she was in university and she made probably hundreds of paintings of these abstract, people-like things – smears of red with shadows for features – that were all over our house when I was a kid. It just seemed like one day all her canvases were gone from the basement where she worked. I saw them wrapped up in garbage bags in the garage.
‘Myra, I’m fine. Everything’s good. It’s fine.’
I almost lay down on that lounge chair with her, I wanted to be smaller to be able to do something like that. I wanted to ask her: Why aren’t you happy? Why aren’t you happy here?
That fourth night we went to this supposedly fancy restaurant, not one of those college-kid joints. This one was called Ralph’s. I knew my mother wanted to leave the second we got there because some twenty-year-old ponytailed shrimp in short shorts was leading us down a black-lit wall to a booth at the back. I was just glad it was dark and they had spaghetti bolognese. Our waitress had on a tight baby-T with a drawn-on tuxedo. Her name tag said Tammy. She leaned down into our leathery circular booth to take our order. Jody and Jeff and I were trying not to laugh, but my mom was tense. Even my dad was too quiet.
Later, Jody told us that that place turned into a topless club at night. Kids weren’t supposed to be there. Jeff was fourteen, I was sixteen, Jody was turning nineteen soon.
‘That waitress wasn’t wearing a bra,’ Jeff said when we were back in our room.
‘She had a boob job,’ Jody said. ‘She was probably a triple D or something but her breasts didn’t sag or move at all. That is physically impossible.’
‘Her tits touched my meatballs,’ I said.